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1. Are the educator kits self-sufficient?
1. Are the educator kits self-sufficient?
To eliminate any time consuming and expensive preparation for the tutor, each package is a fully self-contained unit incorporating all of the components and optoelectronic instruments required to perform the experiments. In addition, extensive literature support is provided including, student manuals which describe the relevant background theory and experimental procedures, and an instructor’s manual with sample results for all experiments and exercises. Hence, the tutor is supplied with all of the material necessary to enable these kits to be directly installed in the teaching laboratory for the students use. Furthermore, to assist with the preparation of the corresponding lecture course, each educator kit is accompanied by a comprehensive set of lecture notes (incorporating examples, design studies, and tutorial questions and solutions) detailing the underlying principles behind the laboratory experiments. Therefore, once the tutor has performed all of the experiments and compared his results with those given in the instructor’s manual, the educator kit can be installed within the laboratory and the students allowed to work through the experiments using the student laboratory manuals. Where appropriate and cost effective, some of the kits may require the use of standard instruments normally
available in student laboratories (e.g. a 20 or 50MHz oscilloscope). If any additional equipment is required it
will be noted on the individual data sheets. 2. Number of students per experiment?
Usually it is arranged that students will perform the experiments individually, in groups of two (preferred), or three (maximum) at any one time. The exact number of students per kit will be decided by the tutor depending on class size, and time available for the laboratory course. 3. How much assistance will the students need?
All of the information required for performing the experiments (i.e. background theory, operational instructions, and experimental procedure) is included in the student manuals. Therefore by following the laboratory manual (which ideally should be read before coming into the laboratory), the student should only require minimal assistance from the tutor / demonstrator while performing the experiments. In addition, because the necessary theory is covered in the manual, the students will have a good understanding of the principles addressed in the experiments, even if they have not yet covered them in their lecture course. 4. Time taken for the experiments?
With minimal assistance from the tutor / demonstrator, it is generally arranged that the students can complete all of the experiments in each kit, typically, in six hours (e.g. two laboratory sessions), provided they have read over the student manual prior to the laboratory session. Further analysis of the experimental results, and other exercise work included in the manuals is completed outside of this time. To reduce the time taken to complete the experiments, the lecturer can provide additional guidance while the students are performing the experiments, and / or select the most relevant experiments to suit the particular lecture course. 5. Can the experiments be open ended?
In certain circumstances the tutor may wish to provide open ended experiments to challenge the more advanced student (i.e. for final year undergraduate or MSc project based experiments). Since the OptoSci educator kits are designed to enable students to investigate important physical principles and key technical issues, it is relatively straightforward to use the equipment for such open ended experiments. Thus the tutor would provide the students with minimum background information and could ask them, for example, to make all of the necessary measurements and interpret them appropriately to determine the following:
or, (b) Make all of the necessary measurements on the waveguides provided with ED-WAVE and carry out the appropriate analyses to determine the design and manufacturing parameters to realise a waveguide which supports a only a single TE polarisation mode at 632nm. Assume that you will use the same manufacturing technique as the waveguides provided. 6. How are the OptoSci photonics educator kits different from other commercial kits?
As discussed in Q.1 above, OptoSci’s range of self-contained photonics laboratory teaching packages offer the tutor an immediate solution to providing a comprehensive and stimulating laboratory based course examining the fundamental principles, enabling technologies, and practical applications in various areas of optics, optoelectronics, and optical communications. OptoSci, to the best of our knowledge, is the only supplier offering such a comprehensive laboratory teaching package in this area. Other commercially available photonics "teaching" equipment tends to simply demonstrate some features of the technology (and in most cases these are limited to very basic features), rather than enabling students to investigate the important physical principles and key technical issues relevant to their lecture course. In fact, in our opinion, what the competition offers is of trivial value for teaching students about the critical technological issues covered in academic courses in photonics. As an example, in our experience, none of the competition (with so called fibre communications kits) allows you to experimentally investigate the key issues of attenuation and dispersion (both material and modal) and to determine how they limit the overall performance of a fibre communications system. OptoSci's ED-COM system enables the students to investigate these key points with only the addition of a standard 50MHz oscilloscope. Furthermore, the general approach taken by many commercial suppliers, is to design student experiments around existing optoelectronic hardware, probably originally conceived for the research or industrial markets. The result of this approach is that the educational objectives and issues addressed in the ensuing laboratory experiments are dictated by the available equipment. Often, therefore, the demonstration or investigation of certain key technical issues and principles are excluded, implying that desirable educational objectives are not realised. OptoSci recognise that it is essential to have a fully integrated approach to the design of laboratory based optoelectronic teaching packages, including: the design of dedicated hardware, experimental procedures, exercises and manuals. Therefore to ensure high quality educational products, OptoSci, in close collaboration with senior academic staff at Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt Universities, develop their kits in accordance with a strict design philosophy of, firstly, defining the educational objectives in the context of the associated lecture course, formulating the experimental investigation to achieve these objectives, and, finally, designing the custom hardware and support literature to enable that investigation. This innovative approach ensures: that all of the educational objectives are realised; that the key technical issues are addressed; and that each complete package can be offered for a price which is realistic within academic budgets.
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