Nine students participated in the Fun with Lasers youth workshop held at the Central Carolina Community College Harnett Main Campus in Lillington.

The Laser & Photonics workshop was one of a series of workshops that are part of CCCC’s Workshops on Weekends (WOW) program. The workshops are designed to show students new technical concepts, to challenge them to make use of those concepts, and to explore future laser-related career opportunities.

The workshop started with a discussion about light energy, then tours through the high-energy laser labs, where current laser program students demonstrated operation of the lasers. The workshop continued with students performing hands-on laser labs with a LASER-TEC photonics experimental educational kit. At the end of the workshop, participants were given the kit ($100 value) to continue doing fun, light-based experiments at home.

During the high-energy laser lab tour, workshop participants observed demonstrations and participated in mini-sessions — Gary Beasley, in the Nd: YAG Laser Lab, who demonstrated a high-powered pulsed laser that sounded like a rifle when the beam hit the target; Isabelle Karis, in the Fiber Optics Lab, who intrigued students demonstrating how crystals and fiber are incorporated into the telecommunication technology they use every day; Cameron Wiedholz, in the Argon-Krypton Laser Lab, who explained to the participants how some gas lasers are able to produce many colors at one time; Robert Strickland, in the Fiber Laser Lab, who demonstrated how a long strand of glass, as small as your hair, is able to create very powerful laser energy; and Jamie Turner, in the CO2 laser lab, who allowed each student to watch as their name appeared on a name tag with the use of the CO2 Engraving Laser.

Several parents extended warmest gratitude after the laser workshop to Gary Beasley, lead instructor in the CCCC Laser & Photonics department, and his current students, who helped with the workshop. He encouraged the parents to expose their children to every source of educational workshops possible to help their daughters and sons make good decisions in their choices of academics and college majors in the future.

The workshop was partly funded through a National Science Foundation ATE Laser and Fiber Optics Grant (LASER-TEC), which CCCC participates as a co-principal investigator. The LASER-TEC Grant supports trying to prepare more students for the fast growing fields of lasers and fiber optics technology. Dr. Chrys Panayiotou, from Indian Rivers State College, is the principal investigator of LASER-TEC. Photonics is the study of the use of light, such as lasers, for industrial and other purposes.

For more information about Central Carolina Community College’s Laser & Photonics degree, visit the college’s website, www.cccc.edu, or contact Gary Beasley, lead instructor, at 910-814-8828 or gbeasley@cccc.edu. For more information of CCCC’s WOW workshops series, contact Wrenn L. Crowe at wcrowe@cccc.edu. To learn more about LASER-TEC, visit http://www.laser-tec.org/.