Keene State College (KSC) is excited to share new pathways, curricular offerings, and outreach focused on workforce development in the areas of optics and precision manufacturing. KSC is a primarily undergraduate institution with a liberal arts focused mission, uniquely located in southern New Hampshire within a strong industrial New England network in precision optics. After collaborative identification of workforce needs, KSC created a series of courses focused on hands-on, technical, and conceptual optics education: Introduction to Optics, Thin Films, Laser Optics, and Ultra-Precision Manufacturing. The Introduction to Optics and Laser Optics courses place practical and conceptual understanding in the foreground so that mathematical representations are integrated with student understanding. The Ultra-Precision Manufacturing and Thin Films courses focus on hands-on education using diamond turning ultra-precision machining and thin film deposition techniques respectively to provide students the necessary technical skills. All courses are designed to be accessible individually or are stackable as multicourse microcredentials. The creation of educational pathways relies on the convergence, collaboration, and engagement from education, industry, and community partners. KSC is working with local industry professionals to explore tailored apprenticeship offerings and intensive bootcamp workshops to deliver key skills outcomes as alternatives to semester-based offerings. Outreach with high schools and career and technical education centers offers increased opportunities to raise awareness regarding careers in optics and the ways KSC educational pathways connect students to this rapidly growing sector. This presentation will highlight key stages of development and challenges toward future growth of optics education at KSC.
It is common instructional practice to introduce foundational concepts such as refraction and lenses in optics instruction beginning with a diagram and an equation, often followed by demonstrations, problem sets, and experiments. This common instructional approach is consistent with how experts understand these phenomena, with mathematical relationships deeply integrated with conceptual understanding and thus the formulas are indecipherable from the core concepts. However, many students do not see the interwoven nature of the mathematics and concepts, and instead see our pivotal mathematical relationships, such as Snell’s Law or the Lensmaker’s Equation, as black boxes that provide an answer or a formula to be memorized, but not understood. These issues are only enhanced for students exhibiting math-anxiety. In this paper, we present an approach for presenting optics concepts in a way that promotes a student’s marriage of conceptual and mathematical knowledge by re-sequencing often used instructional activities. By placing conceptual understanding in the foreground, we can provide students with a rich set of experiences around the phenomena first and then layer formal mathematics ideas on afterwards. In this way, the mathematics become a validation tool for student’s conceptual knowledge. We provide general guidelines for the adoption of this instructional approach, followed by more detailed examples of how this instructional method could be implemented for two foundational optics phenomena: Snell’s Law and the Lensmaker’s Equation.
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