International Day of Light’s Post

And we did it! The Pratibimb Photonics Labs, SCEE IIT Mandi had its first school and community outreach activity on the 28th of May, 2024, organized on occasion of the International Day of Light 2024, #lightday2024. We invited high school students from local schools (Government Senior Secondary School Kathindi, Government Senior Secondary School Nishu, and Mindtree School) and showed them lens demos, an RPi camera based microscope, solar eclipse on a table-top, Tyndall effect, polarization colours and diffraction-based experiments. Towards the evening, we opened the doors to the IIT Mandi community, and we had some wonderful young and inquisitive visitors who asked the most insightful of questions! All the young ones got a specially printed sticker too :) Massive credit goes to the Pratibimb Lab Research students - Iqbal, Adity, MUTHUSERPI S, Suraksha Kundal and Anand Mohan - who put together the demonstrations, and patiently and tirelessly explained the experiments to the visitors all day long. A big thanks also goes to Tarun Verma - an absolute mensch - who helped us in getting in touch with the local schools, and arranged all the associated logistics. Our thanks also go to the school principals of the respective schools, who kindly facilitated the visit of the students. Outreach activities are hard work, but it also leads to fulfilling and rewarding experiences, benefiting not only those who are visiting or demonstrating, but the community at large. In this regard, we sincerely thank Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), DST for the Scientific Social Responsibility grant, using which we have now built an outreach kit that we can use for more such activities. We also thank SCEE IIT Mandi for actively supporting us in this endeavor. Aditya Nigam IIT Mandi Laxmidhar Behera International Day of Light