A brilliant outreach activity was organized by GoPhoton!, an EC FP7 funded project, aimed to engage young men and women to discover how exciting it could be to work as a Photonics scientist.
Students had worked hard during the previous months on photonics themes. On the day, they arrived accompanied by their teachers and family and, as in every scientific conference, picked up their badges. The conference started with a plenary session, in which attendants, about 140 in total, learned about the power of photonics, which was followed by a poster session... with their own posters in it!
Young researchers presented their work, just like professional scientists do. Researchers at ICFO took part in the congress by visiting the session and talking with the students. This gave the young ones the opportunity to meet with professionals and experience first hand an essential aspect of a scientist’s life i.e. networking, to share projects and exchange ideas.
The projects presented during the congress spanned a wide range of photonics themes; from learning how to measure the speed of light using an egg, as explained by a 12 year old student, and determining Planck’s constant using of LEDs as performed by a group of secondary school students, to showing that more information can be gathered when observing an image vertically or horizontally than diagonally, as demonstrated by a student that built a low cost Eye Tracker DIY, or even learning how to synthesize nanomaterials or explaining the STORM technique and applications.
The youngest students participating in the event were only 10 and 11 years old, an amazing couple of very motivated students brought a poster to show the experiments they had carried out to learn about light’s properties of reflection and refraction.
For the final session of the congress, the Head and the Coordinator of ICFO’s Academic Programs awarded the young students with a diploma that certified their attendance and recognized their hard work. In summary, the congress was an absolute success, and visitors left the event asking for a second edition.
Electronic versions of the posters can be downloaded from GoPhoton!’s website. Here is the link, it's worth checking out!