Most impressive! Optics Outreach Games Showcase Student Chapter Projects

On Sunday night, SPIE student chapters celebrated the 10th annual Optics Outreach Games at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2019. As in past years, student chapters from around the world brought their most engaging and imaginative outreach projects to share with an audience of conference attendees, interested groups and families from the area, and of course the expert judges. Perhaps most impressive is that many of the student chapters came to San Diego from international locations, which meant bringing their demonstrations in their luggage — showcasing the portability of the experiments.

This year's competition included entries from 14 teams alongside two special guest exhibitors who showcased their polished outreach kits that are made available to the community: Perla Viera-Gonzålez with the Dumspter Optics Kit and Donn Silberman with the Laser Theme Packets.

The winning teams are:

First Place:
Osaka University Chapter for "Plastic Bottle Microscope"

Second Place:
Vrije University Brussel Chapter for "PHABLABS 4.0"

Third Place:
University Autónoma de San Luis Potosí Chapter for "What is light?"

People's Choice:
University of Arizona Chapter for "Edible Optics — An interactive demo on image formation and optical polishing"

Jess Wade (left) of Imperial College London, Carmiña Londoño of NSF, and Mike McKee of Advanced Materials and Devices, Inc. served as jusges for the games.

Excitable scientist Wade later tweeted: "Outreach games last night were next level awesome. here's one of my favourites, an incense stick smoke box and lenses for visualising ray diagrams. this demo had travelled the whole way from the University of Calcutta to California."
#SPIEOpticsPhotonics #ASEChat pic.twitter.com/qjjqwccCKI— Dr Jess Wade 👩🏻‍🔬 (@jesswade) August 12, 2019