Abstract

We initiate a pilot project of photonics education outreach to Thai society in order to heighten public awareness and to inspire new generations of science and technology in photonics. Our target groups are students, teachers and public people. In our first state, we focus on students and teachers especially in the rural area. Learning-by-playing and critical-thinking-by-doing approaches are selected to nurture and reinforce students. For secondary and high school students, we provide a two-hour seminar on applications of photonics in daily life in order to motivate them to do science or engineering projects related to photonics. Specifically, our technical workshop with hands-on experiments provides a practical way for teachers to inspire their students about optics and photonics. Based on our phase I work with 1044 students from 21 primary schools, we find that 90% of them have fun and gain new asset in photonics. With our approach for secondary and high school levels, there are three projects accepted for the first round in the 2009 Young Scientist Competition. In addition, 90% of 85 teachers from 59 schools recognize and understand more about optics and photonics. In our further work, we will focus on the involvement of public people in order to create a new momentum that fulfills our mission.

© 2009 Optical Society of America