News From Student Chapters

Educational Outreach “Optics at Home” at Lima

Our chapter has begun the educational program with the auspicious of the Optical Society of America (OSA) using a grant obtained for this year.

This program conceived by us has been called “Optics at Home”, which consists of a series of visits to different high-schools located at poor suburbs of the city of Lima. The aim is to improve the knowledge about basic optics using low-cost materials and easy to use. At our country, it is well known that secondary education has neglected the optics during long-time. For changing this situation, we have conceived a program where we go to schools for doing some demonstrations of optics and to give some lectures about the new advances of the optics and how this exciting science is changing our life nowadays.

Our first visit has been very successful, where we could see the enthousiasm and so much interest for learning about rays propagation, light and color. We have also used some OSA Discovery Kits. At end of this visit, we have given as gift a kit and lenses done of plexiglass, with the objective that teachers can use them as educational material at their classrooms.

We will continue this program and we would also like to expand it to other cities of Peru.