Enrich Your Understanding of Science & the Light
OSA Student Chapter at Zhejiang University
After long-term exploration and unremitting efforts, we have built cooperation with the local school, Hangzhou Changhe High School. In order to expand our chapter's influence and bring benefits to more students, this year, we established contact with two new partners, Chaoshan Central Primary School and local Youth Homes. During these activities, we taught the students some knowledge of optics and shared the optical applications in our daily life by slides and experiments with optics suitcase. Students were positive to participate in the experiments with the help of our members. Books of optics stories were carefully chosen for these students as gifts. Competitions of optical knowledge were hold aiming to encourage more students to learn more by themselves. More than 40 members of our chapter participate in the Youth education activities and more than 800 students are impacted.
On Dec.17th 2015, we visited Chaoshan Centre Primary School located in the suburb of Yuhang District, Hangzhou, China. Six members of our chapter gave a lecture of optics to 75 students. First of all, Weixi Liu and Huifang Chen showed some basic optical phenomena to them, such as a pin-hole imaging and mirage. Then, the students did some demonstrative experiments of optics using optics suitcase with the help of our members. To our surprise, some students found out the reason of the polarization experiment through their own thinking.
On Jan.5th 2016, we visited Hangzhou Changhe High School and conducted group counseling activities with more than 700 students from 12 classes in Grade Three. Preparing for the university entrance exam, Chinese students are confronted with 8 normal psychological problems. How to alleviate anxiety? What’s the correct view of confidence? How to improve your interpersonal communication? How to overcome distractions? What’s the correct understanding of examination and test? How to get rid of anguish and inferiority? How to ease the psychological pressure? What should the parents do to support and understand children? With these confusions to weed through, as the teachers, our members let the students have group discussions, one group of about six students with one of the eight topics. After 10 minutes, eight representatives from eight groups summarized their group members’ point of view, including the phenomenon, impact and solution. Through this short course, the students got chances to communicate with each other and solve the common problems. Besides, as postgraduate students, our members offered them advice from a forward-looking perspective.
On Jan.17th 2016, our chapter went into Youth Homes in Hangzhou, and brought an optical course to the left-behind kids. Five members of our chapter acted as teachers and 7 volunteers participated in the class together with dozens of kids. The class began at 2:00 p.m. We used the optical components in the Optics Suitcase to carry out three interesting experiments with these students, aiming to teach them some simple optical phenomena. We prepared three experiments, namely the rainbow Peephole and Diffraction, Magic Stripes and Polarization, Magic Patch and Selective Reflection. Firstly, the teacher showed the suitcase to these kids and asked them to do these experiments by themselves. Then, with the help of our members and volunteers, all the students saw this surprising phenomenon. At last, our members tried to ask more questions to make these kids think about the reasons of experiments and make all of the kids participate in this game. Excited by the interesting phenomena of the experiments, some students raised their hands actively and answered questions perfectly. To our surprise, three of the students got a good understand of the regularity and polarization. Through this activity, the students had expanded their horizons. They were highly encouraged to have experiment by themselves and they were taught about how to solve the problems in daily life.
We would like to thank the party branch of Center for Optical and Electromagnetic Research for their cooperation and support. This series of Youth Education activities are founded by Centennial Special Events Grant.
