An Optics Road Trip
in Rural Australia
Björn Sturmberg and Owen Brasier
Owen Brasier
Björn Sturmberg,
somewhere in the
Australian Outback.
Two members of the University of Sydney OSA student chapter report back from their
two-week road trip through a remote area of the Australian Outback, during which
they gave high school students a unique introduction to hot topics in optics.
The field of optics is of particular interest to people in Australia.
Optical and quantum science are
national research strengths, and the
government is rolling out the National
Broadband Network for Australia
program. It will establish fiber optic
communications to 93 percent of Australian homes, schools and businesses,
delivering unprecedented opportunities
in health, education, business and the
community—particularly in rural areas
where Internet access is currently limited. Many young Australians cannot
remember a time without the Internet;
yet they have little understanding of
how this technology works.
For this reason, we targeted rural
New South Wales (NSW), Australia,
for a two-week outreach tour as part
of the OSA-SPIE Sydney University
student chapters outreach program.
NSW is more than twice the size of
Texas. We drove over 3,500 km as we
looped through the Reverina, Outback
NSW and the Hunter Valley, visiting
11 schools.
Creating the program
In Australia, students must attend school
and take mandatory science classes until
year 10. After that, they can choose to
take another two years of science for
a “higher school certificate,” which is
required for university. We decided to
Organizing a trip over
a 3,500-km expanse
of land in two weeks
was very challenging.
focus our efforts on this group of students. We felt we could have the biggest
impact on their decision to pursue studies
in science and possibly careers in the field.
Organizing a trip over this expanse
of land in two weeks was very challeng-
ing. This was the first time many of
these schools had ever had a science
outreach program. It was not easy to
get our intentions across to the school
administrators and teachers. Through
this process, we learned the value of
developing professional connections with
the head science teachers, which made
the planning process run more smoothly.
Scheduling school visits for so many
consecutive days and over such large dis-
tances—sometimes driving hundreds of
kilometers between schools—also proved
difficult. We found that planning our
trip in the last two weeks of the semester
allowed the schools more flexibility to
accommodate us.
20 | OPN Optics & Photonics News
www.osa-opn.org
