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Girls Electrified by the Montreal OSA Student Chapter

By Yannick Keith Lizé, Benoit Sévigny and François Busque

-For a 7th consecutive year, young teenage girls are invited to participate in different activities aimed at stimulating their passion for science, engineering and technologies.

"Girls and Science: an Electrifying Duo" or "Les filles et les sciences : un duo électrisant" is an annual event aimed at introducing teenage girls aged 13-15 to different aspects of science and engineering. This year, more than 400 girls from across the province attended the event at École Polytechnique de Montréal, and the OSA student chapter was again at the heart of it!

The objective of this day is to demystify science and convey that a career in this field can be captivating and that it does not necessarily mean working in a laboratory with a lab coat on all day! All the participants have the privilege to interact with lecturers, some of them being women studying or working in these fields, role models for the young girls who may perhaps be tempted to follow their footstep and consider a career in a scientific field. Some of those role models will admit it is in high school that they first realised how fun science can be. During the day, the girls participate in high technologies hands-on workshops covering different aspects of science and engineering.

To "shine light" on the fascinating field of optics, the Montreal student chapter put together an interactive workshop in telecommunications for the participants. The hands-on workshop involved optical waveguiding in gelatin (good old Jell-O!) as well as a free-space optical transmission of a radio or microphone signal. A presentation was given to explain the concepts of waveguiding and illustrate the importance of telecommunications in our rapidly evolving world. Each student was provided with a laser pointer, a plastic knife and some pre-made gelatin. The participants made gelatin waveguides, optical power splitters, planar waveguides, etc. They learned and experimented with optical refraction and waveguiding.

We explained the optical phenomena which enables the transmission of light through a fibre optic and the way the light can carry information and sound.

All our chapter members were involved in designing, testing and building ten tabletop pairs of transmitter-receiver setups with everyday life items: 1$ laser pointers, photoresistors, batteries and computer speakers. The purpose of the experiment was to demystify the phenomena involved in the transmission of light. The girls seemed excited in gaining a better understanding of how a telecommunication system works by connecting all the electronics components in the circuit themselves following the provided sketch. After successfully transmitting their voices through free-space, they transmitted it trough the gelatine waveguides they had previously fabricated. Rosalie even assembled many waveguides to accomplish transmission of her voice over a 1 meter long waveguide! It was fun to see how appreciative the girls were. Many of them told us they now wanted to study in photonics (they didn't even know the word at the start of the day!). It was a great opportunity for our OSA student chapter to increase community awareness to optical technologies.

At the end of this day filled with discoveries and knowledge, the girls, set out with concrete information on careers and science, have hopefully found a new passion!

Rosalie is transmitting her voice through the air using the transmitter-receiver she assembled.

Photos © Thomas Desseaux