Spark Your Dream - Celebrating OSA's Centennial
Ningbo University OSA Student Chapter
Our chapter decided to organize a series of youth education activities named “Spark Your Dream” to celebrate the OSA’s 100th birthday. We wanted to impart our knowledge to help younger students in order to foster their interests in optics and science in general to broaden their horizon. We wanted to make the younger students understand what OSA has to offer through these activities.
Our chapter has built a long-time and stable connection with Kongpu High School in Ningbo, China, so we decided to begin the first youth education activity at this school. Before this activity, we carefully prepared the PowerPoint contents and designed experiments to make sure the students can understand the contents and experiments easily. Also, we practiced several times to ensure that this activity can be held successfully. On 7 April 2016, Ningbo University OSA student chapter organize the first activity. Our Chapter President, Junyi Bian, led 14 chapter members to Kongpu High School in Ningbo, giving an interesting and vivid optical basic class for 50 students. First, we introduced the purpose of this activity and our chapter to the students to make them know more about OSA. We showed them activities to foster their interests. Some simple optical experiments and related knowledge were demonstrated and explained to the students by our members appropriately. All experiments were introduced in an interesting way and presentations were adaptive to the understanding of teenagers. The students listened very intently to the lessons and were actively engaged with our experiments and demonstrations. Then, our chapter members were divided into 3 groups and respectively talked with the students. Finally, everyone recorded a video to celebrate the OSA’s 100th birthday and took a group photo.
After the event, most of the students said that through this activity they were able to actively participate in the experiments which helped them improve their thinking and practical abilities where they were able to acquire lots of extracurricular knowledge and began to think about many common phenomena in their daily life. In addition, the student chapter understood the significance of communication and teamwork at a much deeper level as well as got more than expected through teaching and discussing with teenagers. Everyone benefited a lot from this event, we could not wait to hold and participate in the next activity. In a word, we hope we could make more and more people know about the OSA and pay more attention to optics through our efforts. We would like to thank OSA for the Centennial Special Events Grant that allowed us to execute this event.
