As it is usual in the USC-EPS Young Minds Section, we have performed several outreach activities in local Schools. Those activities are addressed to students from 5 up to 18 years old. In order to overcome the high range of ages we have, we offer to the schools a set of activities that will be tuned in order to fit with their necessities.
During the last year we have visited 4 local schools to develop our experiments mainly with children of primary school (below 12). However, we have performed some outreach activities in the faculty (2 activities with a total of 50 students). This new approach allow us to perform some experiments that can not be done in the schools, for example, a hologram activity where children learn about the nature of those items and how it can be built. The experiments in the faculty has some drawbacks, like the renting of some space to perform these experiments. In this case we have pushed the university to collaborate with the section in order to use some space for free.
As it was stated in the grant application, we asked for money in order to buy some optical elements that usually get broken during the activities (specially when small children are involved) like polarizers, diffraction gratings, etc. In this particular case we have bought thin film polarizers that are the easiest item to lose when we perform our experiments.
In conclusion, we considered that a natural step for our section is to push the schools to come to the faculty, where new experiments can be done avoiding their transportation. With this approach we can also offer visits to the faculty and their labs focused on pre-university students.