Next stop is Armenia: ALOP volunteers sharing hands-on approach to teaching optics and photonics
An innovative program that trains physics educators in a hands-on approach to teaching optics and photonics will present its next workshop in November in Armenia. Volunteer instructors with Active Learning in Optics and Photonics (ALOP) will gather from around the world 18-23 November at the Armenian State Pedagogical University in Yerevan for the training session. ALOP is sponsored by UNESCO, SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, the ICTP (Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics), the National Academies of the USA, and Essilor.
Workshop facilitators in Yerevan will be professors David Sokoloff, University of Oregon (USA); Zohra Ben Lakhdar, UNESCO-L’Oreal Laureate, University of Tunis (Tunisia); and Alexander Mazzolini, Swinburne University of Technology (Australia); assisted by Joseph Niemela, ICTP, and Juste Jean-Paul Ngome Abiaga, UNESCO.
Professors Souad Lahmar (University of Tunis, Tunisia), Vengu Lakshminarayanan (University of Waterloo, Canada), and Ivan Culaba(Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines) also are on the ALOP facilitator team.
Modules cover topics such as lenses, optics of the eye, interference, diffraction, photonics, optical communications, and atmospheric optics. Workshops utilize materials and supplies that can be obtained locally and are low in cost, to help participating educators easily incorporate and sustain the lessons within their own STEM (science, technology engineering, and mathematics) curricula.
