Since it’s an essential knowledge for students who work in one research group, also for us the section members, the day started with a speech about (How to work in a team). The main idea was connecting Science with industries by calling one of related industrial companies in field of optics; Scope Optics Company. Its owner and representative, Dr. M. Abd Elazeem was invited to give a speech and he responded pleasantly. The last seminar was given by Lecturer Yusuf and he is also the section treasurer talking about his work which helps central retinal impairment patients to get the overall visual scene.
The event took place in The National Institute of Laser Enhanced Sciences (NILES) supported by Laser Technology Center (LTC). It helps NILES’s staff members and LTC’s members to relate about optical industrial technologies, and optical fabrication stages. Moreover the invented ophthalmic co-axial bi-cone lens Presented by Yusuf. All the section members where involved in the event arrangements. Professors, researchers and students had been invited to this event, and more than 15 attended. a visit to the production place was suggested to extend the knowledge for the upcoming events through the team of EPS Cairo Young Minds section.
Pizza Event!!!
With this title we started an event called “Welcome Young Minds” through which we invited undergraduate students from Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University after finishing their training at National Institute of Laser Enhanced Sciences (NILES) – Cairo University.
They didn’t hear about society and Cairo Young Minds Section before, so it was a great opportunity to welcome them in a short seminar about the goals of our section, and the activates we attend to do . This all happened during a “PIZZA PARTY” yummy yummy!!!!!
This event started with introduction about each member then presentation which contained our goals, methods to reach these goals, and ended by eating PIZZA during good discussion about what we can collaborate to do with them in the next time.
Optical Workshop & Youth Education
In order to explain some optical phenomena as the reflexion, the refraction, diffraction, the scattering, the absorption and the emission of the light we made an OPTICAL WORKSHOP. In these workshops, we visited schools of different academic levels and we did easy and fun experiments to prove to children and to young people that the science is closer to them. We tried to show them that the science is important in our daily life and that everybody can study science. We usually participate in workshops organized by the University Jaume I. In this year, we participated in the following University’s workshops: 1) “Practica a l’UJI”, 2) “FIRUJICIENCIA 2017”, 3) “Colònies Cientìfiques a L’UJI 2017” and 4) “Connect amb la Ciència de la Universitat Jaume I”. It should be noted that our activities were successful, considering that were attended more than 500 pupils. On the other hand, we can say that in the most cases, the optical workshops have become the first contact of society with the science and with our university. Finally, we believe that these workshops help us to promote our outreach activities and the University Jaume I. Moreover, we have shown to the children and teenagers that to study science can be a good option.
Kidutopia Event
EPS Cairo young minds section contributed to an inspiring event for innovative kids called “Kidutopia”. About fifty kids (from five to sixteen years old) attended this event which is the first event that combines sciences, sports and educational consultations for kids in Egypt. This event had many non-governmental organizations that cooperated with us to give these kids an outreaching in different activities. The YM Cairo section organized and implemented simple experiments relating to various motivating physical phenomenon through enjoyable activates. These experiments included optical illusion, water lens and light refraction in addition to some simple optical activities using a laser kit game. This event had a positive impact on the kids through the participation of the children in performing these experiments. Moreover, this event was very exciting to the section members as it served an extremely important part of the community: Kids
Students Meeting at the Start of the Semester
The Students Meeting at the Start of the Semester took place for the fourth time and is beginning to have the status of an established event at the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering (FNSPE). This was mirrored by the high attendance of almost 70 people which increased again, compared to the previous semester. As usual, we invited a high-profile speaker in the Czech Republic to give a talk at our university. This time, because of the recent Nobel Prize in the field, we invited Prof. Jiri Podolsky from Charles University to speak about gravitational waves which is the main topic of his research.
The event was advertised in a timely manner on our increasingly popular Facebook profile, on our web pages, and in the form of posters in several buildings of Czech Technical University and Charles University. Students and faculty from several universities came and enjoyed coffee and tea before the lecture and then attended the presentation. During the subsequent discussion, which is in our opinion the most important part of the event, they enjoyed refreshments organized by us. During the event, we also advertised other activities organized by the Prague EPS YM section.
This event was generally rated as a good idea. The large attendance makes this the most popular single event organized by our EPS YM section and was achieved mainly thanks to the large number of posters that were distributed at the university campuses in Prague. The meeting presents a unique networking opportunity that can connect faculty and students of different ages and from different universities. In addition, such an event can be interesting for the public as well. All these reasons accentuate the need of such high-profile talks at our university.
Physics Café 2
During the winter semester of 2017, a follow-up of the previous semester’s Physics Café was organised as one of the Prague EPS Young Minds events. This time, the aim of the Physics Café project was to further enhance the achievements gained during the first volume of Physics Café i.e. to provide a platform for informal meetings of university students and (senior) scientists and people from academia, with a strong emphasis on informality, and to promote physics and physics related scientific fields among the students.
This semester’s Physics Café was more challenging than ever before. There were major difficulties to find an appropriate venue since the previous one was not suitable for holding the events anymore, and we also struggled to persuade the senior scientists to join (mainly due to their workload). In the end, we managed to organise one event within the Physics Café project. The event called For Science to the Edge of the World was a compilation of short presentations of researchers (mainly from the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and NPI AV CR) who travelled the world to do science, physics in particular. To keep the presentations brief and entertaining, we asked each presenter (9 people in total) to make a Pecha Kucha styled presentation (20 slides, each per 20 seconds). The event, held in the popular Skautský Institut Café in the centre of Prague, attracted around 50 people, making it our most successful Physics Café event ever. During the evening, presenters shared their experience of their research stays, internships, and conferences, all of it in the nippy and fun pace. After the presentation part was finished, a non-moderated discussion involving both the presenters and the audience followed.
It can be concluded that even though we organised not as many Physics Café events as we planned for, we met the expectations for the event quality wise. Physics cafe with its varying programme is getting more and more popular among students and scientists in Prague.
Physics pizza party season 5
One of the main goals of EPS Young Minds project is to connect young scientists among different physics fields. Therefore, Prague section is organizing students’ colloquiums named Physics Pizza Party: Students 4 students, where young scientists from different universities and research fields presented their research activities. These events prove to be very successful in winter semester in 2017.
Totally, we organized four colloquiums this semester, where different physics fields were presented by Ph.D. and master students from our faculty. Topics such as luminescent nanocrystals, mechanics of free fall in practice and modeling of quasicrystals were presented at the colloquiums. For most of invited speakers, it was their first experience to present their research activities in front of the audience which had not been familiar with the topic. Despite of this fact, each talk was perfectly prepared, and therefore it wasn’t difficult to understand given topic. Each event was scheduled for about 90 minutes with half of the time dedicated for the presentation and other half for the discussion, but due to the big interest from the audience and their questions during and after presentation, average time of colloquiums was about 2 hours. According to the speakers it was very rewarding experience for them.
Event promotion was made in form of posters placed in school buildings. It was also advertised on our social webpages, such as Facebook and Instagram, for the purpose of inviting as many participants as possible. Due to this advertisement and students’ high interest, our colloquiums had attendance around 40 students per one colloquium.
The Prague EPS Young Minds Section found these colloquiums rewarding as the “students for students” style of presentations is still rare in our country and is not frequently done by any other organisations. Based on the warm reaction and positive feedback received from colloquiums’ participants, we assume that they were successful. The high number of regular as well as occasional participants motivates us to continue with this activity.
NASA Space Apps Challenge 2017
Since its inception in 2012, the International Space Apps Challenge, a part of NASA’s Earth Science Division, has become the world’s largest global hackathon, engaging thousands of citizens each year across the globe to work with NASA in building innovative solutions challenges we face on Earth and in space using open source data. Space Apps inspires local innovation communities in cities across six continents to convene, ideate and build. Diverse and collaborative teams of technologists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, and others work together in a 48-hour sprint to develop answers to some of the most pressing challenges facing planet Earth using NASA data. Over 25,000 citizens from 69 countries and in 187 cities around the world participated in the 2017 International Space Apps Challenge.
With this, we decided to host the very first NASA Space Apps Challenge in Canary Islands, with 30 participants over the course of two days of work and fun with science and data from NASA and other open repositorires.
This year, the challenge focused on a certain topic, Earth, divided in five different categories:
– The Earth and Us, which mainly consisted in combining NASA Earth Science data with other sources to obtain some short of human-environment interactions.
– Planetary Blues looked for visualizations and analysis of the hydrosphere and cryosphere in novel ways.
– Warning! Danger Ahead! was all about natural disasters through data.
– Our Ecological Neighborhood focused on studies about ecological systems.
– Ideate and Create! asked participants to use data in new creative ways as a more open challenge.
The participant where divided in three teams where each focused on one category, creating a wide variety of results. Yugarta Project focused on the display of whales migration routes and created an app to explain their journey and raise awareness. Rambo is on Fire designed a monitoring system for forest fire which mixed satellite data with drone monitoring on the field, creating a more efficient and effective system. Finally, Guardians of the Earth decided to take their own lead and develop different formulas to reduce pollution with two active systems for the reuse of combustion byproducts, mainly CO2.
Sadly, none of the projects done in this venue was able to reach the global finals. However, the participants were really pleased at the end of the event and asked for more editions in the future.
Thanks to the support of the EPS we were able to pay for food, beverage, office supplies and promotional materials. The local Science Museum of Tenerife hosted the event and Dorada donated some extra beverages.
A report and a explanatory video of each team can be found on the website of the event:
https://2017.spaceappschallenge.org/locations/tenerife/
You can find the full album of the event on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Space-Apps-Tenerife-1272997179416727/
Face2phase conference
The face2phase conference was organized by Optics group on 9-11 October 2017 in TU Deflt. The main topics which were covered during the conference, were holography, computational imaging and lensless imaging. It was an international academic platform where eminent scientists present their ongoing work and new development in the fields. 3 days of conference was completely scheduled with presentations, poster session, holography exhibitions and social evenings. The conference was attended by more than 100 attendees from all over the world. The attendees were students, professors, scientists and employee of prestigious universities and industries.
EPS Delft Young Minds Section and SPIE student chapter Delft were also a part of this conference in organizing a session called SPIE Focus. The primary objective of the SPIE Focus session was leadership skills. The talks given during the SPIE Focus session were mainly focused on the importance of patent and system design in industrial innovation. The session was targeted to the students present at the conference. After this session, we had “talk with experts” session. During this session, we had provided snacks and drinks to the attendees and gave students enough time to interact with the experts and try to have some insight.
The main funding sources for this conference was Photonics NL, Dutch Optics Centre, SPIE Focus and EPS Delft YM section. The conference and the SPIE Focus session were successful and it received large attention within scientific community. Furthermore, we managed to utilize the resources provided by EPS at its maximum potential.
Let’s make fun with science: Sun, light and colored shadows
According to the spirit of the “Let’s mak
e room for science!” project, aimed at discovering the concepts of gravity, energy and light, the EPS Young Mind Section of Rome developed new activities concerning the same topics also in the last months of 2017. These activities were partially founded by the 2017 Activity Grant.
Thanks to the collaboration with the Physics Department of the University of Roma Tre, we started organizing guided observations of the Sun using the solar telescope of the Department. The observations were dedicated to children and young kids from local schools, but they also gave us the opportunity to involve undergraduate students of the Department, who immediately proved not only to be curious about the telescope, but also to be ready to tell themselves what they knew about the Sun to the younger children. During these observations, we also used little globes that could be oriented in order to simulate the illumination state of our Earth, so that participants could learn about the apparent motion of the Sun in the sky during the day, the seasons, equinoxes and time zones.
The concept of light was investigated also with a new exhibit: the “Colored shadows”. We started with three lightbulbs of red, green and blue light, aiming them all at a white screen. A pencil placed in front of the lights would then have not just one, grey shadow, but three and more colored shadows! Turning off one of the colored lights, it was then possible to notice how the color on the screen changed. This simple exhibit allows to deal with different concepts. First of all: the way in which our eyes are able to perceive colors (we have only three types of receptor called cones, that can see the red, green and blue light – from their combination, we are able to perceive millions of different colors). But then it is possible to talk about how the light travels in a straight line. And obviously, how the colors mix to form new shades.
The “Colored shadows” exhibit was used during the European Researcher’s Night 2017 at Roma Tre University. It drew the attention of lots of children who enjoyed watching their ever-changing shadows, but also the young students who were curious to discover the reasons why they were seeing those particular colors.
At the end, the “Let’s make fun with science: Sun, light and colored shadows” project had more than 300 participants between primary, secondary schools students and general public.