2.1

School Visits

Beginning in September 2014, in a program developed by the Iniciativa Tecnológica del Norte (INTENOR) called Planeta Digital, school groups have been visiting the facilities where the PRPI laboratories are temporarily located. Students receive information and orientations on tropical weather, the Arecibo Observatory, career opportunities, entrepreneurship, and photonics. In the photonics visits, the school groups are divided into small groups that visit PRPI’s laboratories. They are shown demonstrations of how light, lasers, fiber optics and related phenomena work, while discussing how these things play roles in their lives and the technologies they hear about. The demonstrations include the following:

Figure 1.

Picture of the laser balloon popping apparatus.

We also give a short presentation on PRPI and the opportunities it offers.

In the 8+ months of the program, over 1400 students have visited with their schools and been exposed to lasers and photonics technologies. These students visit the laboratory in groups of 15-20 and including one or two teachers per group. If there are much larger groups, PRPI sets up demonstrations in a conference room capable of seating 50 or more participants.

In Figure 2, we show the percentages of the over 1400 students by grade level. Over 70% of the students who have seen PRPI demonstrations at our laboratories are in middle school, 7-9^th grades (ages 11-15). Of the remaining, nearly 11% are at elementary school level and 10% are in high school. This is mostly a function of the schools themselves, and not so much that of student interest.

Figure 2.

Statistics on school visits to the PRPI laboratories.

2.2

Presentations for Veterans, Displaced Workers and Other Adults

In 2014 PRPI was awarded a grant from the US Department of Labor TAACCCT (Trade Adjustment Assistance and Community College Career Training) program. The TAACCCT program was created in order to provide a pathway to new careers for workers displaced by plant closings, which were motivated by trade agreements negotiated by the US government. In addition to the so-called TAA-eligible, the TAACCCT program specifies the need to provide career training to veterans and other adults (such as those who are under-employed). PRPI makes presentations and provides materials for outreach to these groups.

Our presentations for this program are aimed to both help existing and promote growth in industries for which photonics provides enabling technologies. Among the priority industries for economic growth within Puerto Rico are aerospace and medical devices.

2.3

Teachers’ Workshops

PRPI has carried out three teachers’ workshops sponsored by the Puerto Rico Department of Education Math-Science Partnerships program. In these workshops, we utilize kits such as the OSA Optics Suitcase for hands-on activities. We couple these with a subset of the demos we offer to schools, described above. Through this program, PRPI has reached over 500 math and science teachers from public and private primary and secondary schools. In Figure 3 we show the scene at the Conquistador Hotel in Fajardo Puerto Rico during our workshop on 22 November 2014.

Figure 3.

A view of the PRPI Teachers Workshop, at the Puerto Rico Math-Science Partnerships Congress, 22 November 2014 in Fajardo, PR.

2.4

General Public

PRPI is currently developing hands-on exhibits to use at public events such as festivals and jobs fairs, as well as placing in museums for special events. The current exhibits are based on a laser pattern generator and permit the user to project art and patterns using one or more laser beams. The development has been carried out by three undergraduate engineering students, two from the University of Turabo and a third from the University of Puerto Rico. There are two designs that are under development. One is a Lissajous figure generator in which a visitor can control the oscillation of a mirror about two axes, and a laser reflected off of the mirror draws a pattern on a screen. The second is a laser projector, coupled with an art program, which allows a user to sketch, write messages, etc. and project the result.

These projects attract people to the technologies of optics and photonics who are not normally drawn to technology by connecting optical technologies with art. We envision this as a way to broaden the impact of photonics and to diversify the population of those interested in photonics careers.

2.5

Website, Social Media, Apps and Videos

From the PRPI website (http://prpi.suagm.edu) we connect to a number of online resources, including our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube feeds. The YouTube page has a video (in Spanish) explaining photonics and PRPI. A second video is currently in production at the time of this writing, but it should be online by the time of the presentation. PRPI uses social media (and the International Year of Light calendar) to advertise its activities. On the social media, we also post interesting photonics-related news items, generally related to R&D. PRPI also has an App site, hosted at the web domain http://prphotonics.org, and which is accessed from our main page. The Apps are interactive programs, the first for wave propagation (Error! Reference source not found.) and the second, a ray tracing App, is under development. The wave propagation App is described in a companion paper.

Figure 4.

Interface for the PRPI wave propagation online app, which is accessible from our website: http://prpi.suagm.edu/education.

As the App development is subject of a separate presentation, we will focus here on production of two videos on photonics and PRPI. These are meant to introduce to the Puerto Rico population what photonics is about and its significance for the local economy. The first video was developed by three students, who are co-authors in this paper, Jesús López, Miguel Rivera, and Ray Suarez. As the background for these students was not in science, the production was a process of them learning about the specific phenomenon to be presented and then determining an appropriate way to make that presentation. The second video is in the final editing stages. It is a professional production by the environment and science production company Geoambiente, and subsidized by a grant from the PRST and support from UMET. We expect it to be on our YouTube site (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPd1XqbEsVgw31PGPgHZB8Q) by the time this work is presented.

2.6

Universities and Researchers

State support for PRPI is founded on the state effort to foment aerospace manufacturing and R&D to Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO) has established an aerospace cluster in order to bring together government, industry and universities to support this effort. In so doing, they not only attract aerospace industry to the island, but create the infrastructure to support it. The education component of this cluster seeks to join forces and unify resources to permit students at the local universities to obtain a diverse and complete preparation to contribute throughout the wide variety of activities associated with aerospace manufacturing, R&D, and service, among other things.

Through the aerospace consortium PRPI is in the process of gaining a number of important benefits. These include:

In addition to aerospace, biotechnology (particularly medical devices) and communications industries are also advancing in Puerto Rico, and their presence can offer similar benefits to PRPI. Much progress has already been made through mutual interests with the medical device industry, and the decades-long history of the pharmaceutical industry is also a promising target for collaboration.

Puerto Rico has many forefront research programs at its universities, and it is of course the home of the Arecibo Observatory. This sector is crucial to the long-term vitality of PRPI, as it is through PRPI post-graduates having research opportunities that the fields of optics and photonics will continue to grow in Puerto Rico.