From school classes to UNESCO: IYL-enabled environments for tackling the STEM skills shortage through student-led outreach

Abstract

The accepted industrial skills shortage in the subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the United Kingdom has led to an increasing drive for universities to work with a wider pool of potential students. One contributor to this drive is the Lightwave Roadshow, a photonics-focused outreach program run by postgraduate students from the University of Southampton. The program has benefitted from the unique platform of the International Year of Light (IYL) 2015 for the development and support of hands-on and interactive outreach activities. In this report we review Lightwave activities facilitated by IYL that focused on widening participation for students aged 6 to 18 years from a multitude of societal categories; the roadshow has directly benefitted from the significance and investment into the IYL in conjunction with university recruitment strategies, local schools and the support of international organizations such as SPIE and OSA. Lightwave has used the foundation of the IYL to provide a wide range of activities for over 1,200 UK students in 53 different schools; the assessment tools used to measure learning outcomes, reach and impact are also discussed. The program's activities have been developed to make younger age groups the center of the outreach activity and create an environment which encourages youth pursuit of optics and science from a grassroots level upwards; to illustrate this we will outline a Lightwave project endorsed by the IYL steering committee to permit two 6 th form students to attend the IYL opening ceremony in Paris.

Taking local optics outreach abroad for IYL 2015: administrative and logistical challenges and strategies

“…Finally, we detail an example of the demonstrations which we use, contained in a portable, single-person operable optics outreach kit in Sec. 6, and conclude the paper in Sec. 7.…”

A collaborative approach to schools engagement training for university staff

“…Alongside the findings outlined in the Introduction, and in Spurrell et al (n.d.), one of the major outputs of the Talk to US! SUPI was the Building School-University Partnerships Guide Book (Wager, 2016), a now internationally recognized (see, for example, Posner et al, 2016) resource for school-university partnership working. The Guide Book material leant itself well to a practical training session, and a suitable gap in our researcher development programme was identified: the number of UoS staff delivering material for schools was vast, often with little quality control and based on peer learning, and only one schools-specific training session was then available, the introductory Meet the Scientist training from LifeLab (Woods-Townsend et al, 2016).…”

Student-led outreach and public engagement activities at the University of Southampton to celebrate the inaugural International Day of Light

“…In the last few years, there has been growing interest in the inclusion of the arts and design into the promotion of STEM subjects. The extended Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (STEAM) agenda would increase the creativity of students and provide real-world context for learning 12 . The increasing popularization of STEAM has led to a variety of approaches 13 , including the aforementioned presentation of optical fiber research at a garden show.…”