IoP Teacher Conference

This year’s annual Institute of Physics Teacher Conference took place at UCL, and our team at Metabolight were keen to get involved! We held a workshop for the teachers to share our work and help relate real-world research back to the classrooms.

We started the workshop introducing the basic principles of white light, before imaginative use of gummy bears and different coloured ‘finger LEDs’ helped to demonstrate concepts such as absorption and reflection. Next, we got interactive! We asked the teachers to get out their smart phones and shine the white light from their camera flash through the tip of their finger, to demonstrate how red and near-infrared light can travel through tissue (including bone). Finally, we introduced the pulse oximeter, a medical device which utilises the same concepts we use in our research. We concluded with some examples of the optical systems we are building in our team and how these are being used in the hospital to monitor brain-injured babies.

It was a great experience sharing our work with such an engaging audience, and we hope to get involved with more of these workshops in the future.

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