OSA ITS Goes to School (OIGoS)
Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) OSA Student Chapter
OSA ITS Goes to School (OIGoS) is a new program from OSA ITS Student Chapter for high school students in Surabaya city. This successful program contains workshop program about some current and future development of optics/photonics that is specially designed for Senior High School student with interesting teaching ways and some optical devices experiments. We have successfully visited some schools from some targets such as Yapita Senior High School, Surabaya 20 Senior High School, IPIEMS School, Surabaya 3 Senior High School, Muhammadiyah 2 Senior High School, and Surabaya 21 Senior High School.
In this program, we focus on four fundamental topics of optics/photonics. First, we introduce the overview of geometrical optics, including the law of reflection, the Snell’s law, the dispersion of light and the formation of rainbows, and the exploration about how lens forms images. Second, there is an explanation about lenses and optics of the eyes to learn about the differences between images formed by positive and negative spherical lenses, and to understand the refractive anomalies of the human eye (aberation, astigmatism, etc.). Third, there is an optical data transmission topic including the exploration about how information can be transmitted from sender to receiver, how information can be transmitted using light, what the Wave Division Multiplexer (WDM) method is, and how to demonstrate the optical modulation. Fourth, we share knowledge about light-matter interaction.
All of the shared topics in this program is fully supported by the Explore Optics Kit that was given by OSA. This experimental kit was useful to demonstrate many of the optical experiments where the visualization helped the students understand the topic, since they often feel very difficult to understand some topics taught in their school if it is just a written theory from book or a brief explanation from their teacher.
This OIGoS program finally spreads a big impact for some schools in Surabaya, especially for some under-developed schools that do not have an enough quality-experimental kit. With this kind of little social project, many of senior high school students in Surabaya with a life-science major finally get a good understanding of basic optics/photonics field and also get interest to learn this field more when they continue their study in college/higher education. They finally get a knowledge about the future development and great potential of optics/photonics, so that some of them want to take the optics/photonics concentration for their major in college.
We really thanked The Optical Society (OSA) who awarded us the Centennial Special Events Grant for this program as well as being supportive of many of OSA ITS Student Chapter programs, especially this kind of social project for youth education. This successful new program will be re-designed and held in the next years, with the consideration of both the impact and evaluation from this year. Finally we are all sure that a full support from OSA will not only give impact for OSA ITS Student Chapter, but also give impact to the entire worldwide communities, due to our same goal to succeed the importance of learning and developing the science of optics/photonics and its applications.
