Outreach: Optics for Kids

Although aviation, music, and space have alternated as the major obsessions in my life, my educational background (not to mention my job) is in physics and optics. Long before I started doing space-related educational outreach, I created some presentations and a web site on basic optics, with a little bit of material on science and engineering careers. Optics for Kids (OFK) has been around the web since 1995, and in the late nineties and early 2000's, I was often getting emails from parents, teachers, and students saying that it was a helpful site. OFK even received a few awards, though most of the awarding web sites now seem to be gone.

Optics for Kids has remained on line but until recently, it had the same tired nineties-style design that I created back when I was first learning HTML (which I have since all but forgotten). Thanks to a talented new person at my company, I'm happy to say that OFK has now received a long overdue facelift and a bit of new content. I'm hoping we can further expand the content over the next few months, but at least its form and content are now relatively modern and easy to use. It also now includes a few interactive Flash goodies, courtesy of David Harrison of the University of Toronto. David also has a number of other cool Flash animations for physics.