Light and Color for Minority Middle Schoolers

Underrepresented middle-school children are the focus of a new optics outreach program. “It’s all about fun and exploration,” says Steve Pompea, manager of science education at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona. “We don’t even call it optics. We call it light and color.”

Hands-On Optics: Making an Impact With Light (HOO) pairs optics professionals with teachers to work with kids in informal settings such as science centers and after-school programs. The optics professionals will be volunteers culled from the memberships of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE). The program’s other partners are NOAO, which is developing HOO’s experiments, and Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA), an organization with a track record of helping and inspiring underrepresented students to perform well in math and science. In 2000–01, 74% of underrepresented students who received a bachelor’s degree in engineering in California had participated in MESA programs.

“It’s very unique to get two major professional societies working together,” says HOO principal investigator Anthony Johnson, director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Indeed, several years ago, OSA and SPIE made a controversial and unsuccessful attempt at merging (see Physics Today, November 1999, page 63 ).

“We are going to go into those areas where kids don’t have access,” says Johnson. “You’ve been hearing about the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education”—the 1954 Supreme Court decision to integrate schools—“and just how separate and unequal it still is. I’ve been doing this [kind of outreach] for years, but it’s great we’ve been able to set up a more formal structure.”

Targeting kids before high school is key, Johnson adds. “A few years ago, I gave a seminar at an inner-city high school. Their eyes glazed over. After they hustled out, two young ladies snuck back into the auditorium. They didn’t want their peers to know they were interested in the science. It wasn’t cool to be smart. Then I gave the same talk at an elementary school. The bright young faces were all excited. That’s the difference between high school and elementary school.”

HOO projects will include building kaleidoscopes and telescopes, experimenting with UV and IR light, and arranging mirrors so that a laser shines on a predetermined spot. The program’s planners are also developing an optics competition like the egg-drop and bridge-building competitions that MESA sponsors. And to show kids what sorts of careers are possible in optics, HOO will use posters, videos, and class visits by professionals.

The first training program for teachers and volunteers took place last month, and the experiments will be taken into communities in southern California and Washington State this fall. HOO aims to reach 40 000 kids across the US by August 2006.

After that, having used up its $1. 7 million in NSF seed money, HOO is supposed to become self-sustaining. Jason Briggs, OSA program manager for HOO, says it’s too early to estimate the cost of keeping the program going, but the plan is to raise funding and inkind contributions from industry. Information about HOO will be available at the end of this month on the Web at http://www.hands-on-optics.org .