This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 11480, including the Title Page, Copyright information, and Table of Contents.

Welcome to Optics Education and Outreach VI

An Associate of Science Degree is essential for technical students who seek applied, hands-on employment in the technical workforce after education at a community college. Pasadena City College administration has stepped up to work with experienced faculty to create a program in Laser Technology that is based on tested, industrial skill-driven curricula. This paper will discuss the foundation of this Laser Tech Program and its guidance by its many industrial advisors.

Lake Washington Institute of Technology (LWTech) is a publicly-funded workforce college located in Kirkland, WA. The newest addition to the college’s programs list is a two year (AAS) degree in Lasers and Optical Technology which was recently approved. The program is designed for students who desire an entry-level job as a Photonics System Technician or a Specialist in one of the many Photonics companies located in the Seattle Area. In this paper, the authors outline briefly the new program’s key elements including the motivation behind selecting this project, the degree pathway, methods of instructions, preparation progress, and the current recruitment activities.

For the last fifteen years, Universite Laval’s SPIE Student Chapter has been building strong links between academia and industry to better prepare its student members to face their future career and to guide them towards industry. With now over fifty companies working in the field of optics and photonics in the Quebec City area alone, this makes it one of the best places in the world for students to visit companies and learn about companies’ expertise, equipment and work environments. In 2017 and for the first time at Universite Laval, the Student Chapter organized a day-long workshop where students had to solve real-world industry-related problems presented by high-end optics-related companies, i.e. an industrial seminar. Now at its fourth edition, a retrospective picture investigating the success of this event can be drawn. Over the years, more than 20 companies from Quebec City’s rich optics and photonics area were invited to present their domain of expertise to students through conferences, product demonstrations and original problem scenarios encountered in the past. As a result, no fewer than 100 students were familiarized with the work of these technology companies. They also exchanged and shared ideas with expert engineers, physicists, chemists, etc., and were given real-world problems to solve. From this process, direct links were created between the employers and the future employees, and a clearer picture was drawn for graduates envisioning an industrial career. Consequently, this event has shown to be beneficial for both students and companies.

Significant attention has been paid to the general need for STEM degree recipients to develop non-technical skills, often referred to as ‘soft skills,’ in order to be effective in the private sector careers that the majority will pursue. The unique challenges that PhD recipients face when transitioning into the private sector after years spent in academic research has received far less attention. My experience indicates that many of the thinking and working habits developed through earning a PhD are actually counterproductive in an industry setting. This perspective has been obtained through working in the private sector for more than 20 years, as well as numerous interviews of industry managers and early career STEM PhDs who have made the transition out of academia. All too often, the time spent conducting dissertation research places a heavy emphasis on sole responsibility for a multi-year project, and trains one to be very thorough and withhold judgement until sufficient data and analysis support a conclusive recommendation. This practice does not align well with the quick-paced nature of the private sector, where projects must advance at a rapid pace and decisions must be made quickly with less certainty than may be desired. Teamwork is essential, and one must regularly rely on the expertise of others. I will discuss training approaches that help early career PhDs understand the behaviors that will bring success in their industry careers. The significant role that research groups that collaborate with industry play in preparing PhDs for industry will also be reviewed.

A course has been developed for students interested to learn practical design procedures for automotive lighting applications. The course covers topics such as imaging and non-imaging optics, LED lighting, plastic optics, plastic part design, optical manufacturing, injection molding, optical tolerancing, computer aided lighting and computer aided design, and economical aspects of product development. The students work through several projects on rear lighting and forward lighting. The present paper summarizes the pedagogy in optics education in the second offering of the course, inspired by the experiences from the first offering, the feedback from students, and the feedback from industry. Challenges faced during teaching the course, both technical and pedagogical, are discussed.

Initiatives in education and training tailored to industry needs have been a core part of the bi-annual SPIE Optics Education and Outreach conference, accounting for over 50% of papers since its inception in 2010. In this paper, the authors explore whether this conference has been useful to the readership by reviewing the contributions to this meeting for industry-oriented activities. Accounting for this scope, a bibliographic review of the literature of all five proceedings of OP301 is presented to describe the participants in terms of their affiliations and background, the proceedings’ taxonomy, and the metrics for downloads and citations. An integrative review will support this report to present lessons learned in six key areas of (1) technician training, (2) continuous education and training in industry, (3) in-company training and internships, (4) local and regional economic development through optics and photonics education and research, (5) progress on accreditation and certification, and (6) programs in innovation and entrepreneurship. The findings will be used to evaluate trends in formal and informal methods for industry-related programs and make recommendations for areas of potential focus for future meetings to continue serving wider segments of the community.

Public optics outreach is critical for fostering a passion for optics building the workforce that will solve the photonics challenges of tomorrow. This paper will cover the strategies and hands-on demonstrations that Edmund Optics used to build and scale a company-sponsored optics educational outreach program that now teaches over 2,000 students every year through over 60 events. The students reached through these events range from third grade to high school students. Internal promotion of the program has led to over 45 employees participating every year at local schools, museums, and local events. A system for on-site school visits allows students to take field trips to Edmund Optics’ headquarters, and established shadow programs allow high school students to experience different careers in the optics industry. The program is now scaling to a global level, and best practices and strategies for scaling up a company-sponsored educational outreach program will be discussed.

The Wyant College of Optical Sciences (OSC) at The University of Arizona participates in a variety of outreach activities in all levels of the education system and the Tucson community at-large, reaching thousands of students each year. We have created immersive workshops including “D.I.Y. Optics” and “CSI: Optics – Optical Forensics”. For large audiences, we emphasize “pocket optics”, cost-effective giveaways such as pixel magnifiers, the Pepper’s ghost illusion, and Fresnel lenses. New resources and lesson plans are centralized on an online hub, which started as a UA/NASA Space Grant project in 2018 and now facilitates instructor training and acts as an on-demand resource for troubleshooting demos in the field. We share successes and lessons learned from our outreach events, culminating in 10th Annual Laser Fun Day in March 2020, the flagship student-led event supported by the Student Optics Chapter (SOCk) and Women in Optics (WiO).

This paper summarizes the effort to date to develop a proposed Scouts BSA Optics/Photonics merit badge, suggests activities that can be done now, and recommends actions for the future. The paper also includes a description of merit badges from the author’s point of view. The proposed Optics/Photonics merit badge would (1) Educate and expose potentially thousands of scouts and adult scout volunteers annually to the science, technology, manufacturing, and potential of optics and photonics; (2) List the organizations and academic institutions with optic, photonic, and photonic technician programs; (3) Help people make informed career decisions; (4) Advance the Scouts BSA STEM goals; and (5) Provide scouts with interesting and exciting activities.

Stereopsis is the most advanced stage of vision. This characteristic of our visual system and its applications is particularly interesting for optics and optometry students and professors. It is also significant for other disciplines, including history of art, history, fine arts, and architecture, where stereophotos and anaglyphs provide an effective, easy-to-use tool for enabling depth perception of historical-artistic heritage (monuments, architecture, sculptures, etc.). Stereoscopic vision has also led to attractive applications for the general public in the field of entertainment (3D cinema, virtual reality, etc.). However, people’s knowledge about how our stereoscopic vision works, or how a stereo photo is made, is limited. To improve the teaching and learning process about these issues in formal education, we developed an innovative interdisciplinary teaching project, carried out over four academic years, which connected stereophotography and stereoscopic vision with the historical-artistic heritage of Granada, Spain. The participants included professors and undergraduate students from the degrees in optics and optometry, fine arts, history, history of art, architecture, and law at the University of Granada. They studied various monuments and visited these, sharing their knowledge, working collaboratively and writing reports, as well as making stereophotos, stereoscopes and 3D glasses. We also provided scientific and cultural outreach through a publication (involving interdisciplinary knowledge and anaglyphs of Granada), and carried out several conferences and exhibitions, some of which were part of the International Day of Light in Spain, such as the exhibitions “GRANAglyphs” (Parque de las Ciencias Science Museum, Granada) and “Anaglifos galdurienses” (Jódar, Spain).

In honor of UNESCO’S First International Day of Light (IDL) in 2018, Universit´e Laval’s SPIE Student Chapter set out to design a large-scale outreach initiative that would be both artistic and educational. The goal of this project was to design a new way for people to interact with light through human-scaled experiments outside of traditional channels such as schools, museum or libraries. It was realized that the required skills to fulfill requirements would exceed those of the mostly physics-oriented student chapter. Between the three consecutive yearly editions of The Optical Terrace, multidisciplinarity was a focus for this student-led initiative. Promoting collaboration between physics, architecture, art, marketing and communication has proven to be a challenge that our team has learned to manage. In this paper, we will explain the solutions we came up with that had the most success in keeping active involvement of our members and to steer the design within our requirements.

In this article we report on the activities in Spain related to the celebration of the International Day of Light (IDL). The Spanish Committee for the IDL was constituted in 2017, as a continuation of the previous Committee for the International Year of Light (2015). This Committee involves different academic, scientific and industrial partners in Spain related to light science and light technologies, and develops actions to promote and disseminate the IDL activities. After the success of the 2018 and 2019 editions, the 2020 IDL celebration has been totally affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and most of the programmed events were cancelled. Nevertheless, some on-line activities were developed. The aim of this work is to review the IDL impact in Spain in these last three years.

This paper explains the realization of a concept for research-oriented photonics education. Using the example of the integration of an actual PhD project, it is shown how students are familiarized with the topic of research and scientific work in the first semesters. Typical research activities are included as essential parts of the learning process. Research should be made visible and tangible for the students. The authors will present all aspects of the learning environment, their impressions and experiences with the implemented scenario, as well as first evaluation results of the students.

Physical optics education is already an indispensable part in optics education, because of the fact that more and more optical devices are designed, and naturally, are working based on physical-optics principles. Various physical optics effects and phenomena, although being covered in certain textbooks, they still turn out to be difficult to fully understand, due to the disconnection between the purely theoretical blackboard derivation and the completely practical laboratory observation. One way to overcome that, in our opinion, is to employ VirtualLab Fusion – physical optics software – as a bridge connecting both sides. Light is represented as vectorial electromagnetic fields in VirtualLab Fusion and it provides an easy access to the visualization and analysis, leading to a convenient understanding of the nature of light, without loss of any preciseness. With its help, we will demonstrate several physical optics effects as well as their applications in modern optics industry.

The paper describes how students are involved in applied research when setting up the technology and running a live event. Real-time IP transmission in broadcast environments via fiber optics will become increasingly important in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to create a platform in this area where students can learn how to handle IP infrastructure and fiber optics. With this in mind, we have built a fully functional TV control room that is completely IP-based. The authors present the steps in the development of the project and show the advantages of the proposed digital solutions. The IP network proves to be a synergy between the involved teams: participants of the robot competition and the members of the media team. These results are presented in the paper. Our activities aim to awaken enthusiasm for research and technology in young people. Broadcasts of live events are a good opportunity for "hands on" activities.

The difficulty in designing new optical systems lies in the fact that design remains largely an “art” that depends on the experience and intuition of the developer, rather than a precise engineering discipline that strictly and unambiguously algorithms the design process. This circumstance is quite noticeable in the optical industry, where young specialists need time to adapt to practical work on the design of optical systems. These circumstances lead to the need to pay special attention to teaching programs of optics education that will ensure that students receive the necessary competencies for the successful fulfillment of production tasks for the development of complex optical systems in industry. The report will present our proposals on the necessary refinement of master's programs of study and the formation of joint training programs for lens designer.

We will discuss the history and accomplishments of our employee-led STEM Outreach Committee. Our slogan “To Inspire with Light” is one element of the group’s charter, which also includes Mission and Vision statements that emphasize photonics education activities in San Diego County. The committee comprises approximately 20 employees who donate time to support the group. Our company provides support in the form of Executive encouragement, budget and allowance for time spent in execution of program events. Our committee has been operating for 3 years and has organized and/or participated in over two dozen events and programs in support of our mission.

As part of an educational Optics and Photonics kit being developed for new programs at Bridgewater State University (BSU), including a new Photonic and Optical Engineering BS program and a Photonics Technician certificate, we are creating several lab exercises emphasizing both, skills and quantitative analysis, for the understanding of light, for instance the coupling of free-space laser light into fibers. These experiments include lenses, inverse telescope, objective, aperture and mirrors to couple class 2 visible laser light into single-mode and multi-mode fibers. In addition to the optical alignment and focusing skills required, students measure the transmitted power and minimize the coupling losses, quantifying them in decibels (dB). Students create scattering matrices and make numerical aperture (NA) estimations. Polarization control measurements are added to compliment the understanding of electromagnetic fields. In time we will expand the kit to include lab experiments that cover full courses in both free-space and fiber optics to meet the demands of both technicians and engineers in industry.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions have adopted digital technologies as a medium to share the knowledge and to connect with the students. The idea of learning and teaching has taken a huge turn and needs to be customized and made innovative since the technological era has stepped in. Although the educational information and knowledge are easily available over the internet, the fruitful gains of meaningful knowledge assimilation can only be achieved under the supervision of teachers/mentors. Taking this ideology forward, this paper presents pedagogical techniques to virtually connect with students leading to successful inculcation of the theoretical knowledge with practical wisdom unto the student’s mind. The pedagogical idea was exercised with school students studying from 6th to 12th grade. Initially, a teacher-student connect was established. Then, the students were pro-actively made to understand topics through self-apprehended practicals at home, keeping up with the age-old conventional environment so as to gradually ease them in the virtual technology. Practical and tasks that were carried out throughout the pedagogy played a major part in the development of mind with curiosity, questioning and constructivism, emphasizing on the weak points and strengthening their concepts in optics.