Don’t ask don’t get
I have in my possession a portable outreach education kit named TS Squared: Teaching Students to Teach Students.
It fits in a back pack, weighs less than 2.5 kg and is going to go on tour with me around universities in Canada and the USA.
In this box you will find hands-on experiments and visually exciting demonstrations on the subjects of photonics and electronics: mirrors, colours, EM spectrum and telecommunications. These are accessible to students who are not specialist in the subject area, and will enable them to understand and teach the fundamentals to younger students or peers.
The box also contains samples of the research that is carried out at the Optoelectronics Research Centre in Southampton. This is where I get to talk about my work on Integrated Photonics and my upcoming presentation, and grow the number of potential attendees!
We have sample give-aways (more on this in a bit) to give people ideas and explain how we can use different gifts to measure the quality of our engagement. Business cards are for business, diffraction gratings for a meaningful scientific interaction, and quantum key rings for something really special!
Back to the original quote then. I asked the conference organisers if we could display this kit, and they gratefully accepted my request and put me up in the conference exhibition hall.
It has been an enriching experience. I’ve enjoyed working with fellow-PHD student Miranda Turvey on the exhibit, and telling 8 research students, 3 conference organisers, 2 friends visiting Vancouver, 6 world-leading researchers and 3 members from industry about the outreach & public engagement of my research that I do, imparting some new scientific or practical knowledge on how I do my outreach. The table has also brought together 12 researchers from the Optoelectronics Research Centre and Gregory Quarles, the OSA’s chief scientist.
There’s a sour note to all this though. Today, 5 of our display items went missing*. People may have assumed that anything left out was fair game to take. Absolutely gutted that I’m missing these, but the show will go on.
Because it does. Today, I’ve had coffee to discuss potential outreach projects with Cloud State University, Minnesotta, discussing with universities in the USA and Canada to present the kit to the chapters, and learning exciting new stuff at this incredible conference.
* Update 21/07: the items have been retrieved and the show will go on!