Visits to schools is one of the science comms activities anchored within larger research projects. An elegant way to explain science in a way comprehensible to the general public and young students is to get them in touch with hands-on experiments. For this purpose, the team of AIT visited a middle school in Vienna to enrich two physics lab courses of second-grade classes of the school’s scientific branch.
Within each of the lab courses, students were able to grasp the physics behind light, including basics concepts from optics such as refraction, reflection and diffraction. Music was streamed over a jet of water to resemble fiber-optic channels that convey light based on total internal reflection. Water samples were analyzed through a simplified microscope consisting of nothing more than a droplet of water, yielding a 500-fold magnification that enabled the students to see fine-grained organic particles within the liquid. Diffraction at human and feline hair samples allowed them to precisely determine their widths in the range of 10 to 100 microns. LiDAR allowed them to take a rather unusual class photo with the eyes of a car, while the fringes of light projected by an interferometer were dancing at the rhythm of their voice. These interactive experiments were complemented by further hands-on setups including LiFi to switch between classic music and the latest hits from 2024, thermal imaging to probe the capacity of different chocolate biscuits to store energy, and a virtual journey to the end of the universe, where the physical principles of optics can be found at much large scale, as for example evidenced through gravitational lenses.
As also experienced in the past, the outreach activity was rewarded by the strong interest of the students and a very positive feedback.