The Sacramento area Boy Scouts Golden Empire Council had a huge annual three-day outreach as part of the Youth Fair component of the January 2024 International Sportsmen's Expo. The Expo is held every January in Sacramento at Cal/Expo. The Boy Scout STEM outreach activities included many interactive activities related to optics and photonics. Visitors to the STEM tables were usually children ages 3 to 12, accompanied by their parents. Approximately 120 children visited the STEM tables. This was the third year we had STEM activities.

A new activity this year was the “Send a Morse Code Message Using Plastic Fiber Optic Cable and Light” activity. I asked the children if they would like to create their own internet. The children always answered yes.

I explained how we could send letters and numbers using light (using four different colored LED flashlights), similar to Morse Code. However, instead of using Morse Code electric “dots” and “dashes” we would use flashlight “greens” and “reds”.

We communicated with each other, sending and receiving letters, words, and numbers, which is what the internet does. It doesn’t matter if one is sending 1’s and 0’s (via electricity/lasers), or colored lights (via the plastic fiber optic cable).

To demonstrate Total Internal Reflection I shined a flashlight first into a curved unpainted pvc pipe, then into a curved painted pvc pipe (the interior was painted with a shiny metallic spray paint). The two pipes were side by side, and one could easily see how much more light traveled through the painted pipe.

Boxes of many short pieces of pvc pipe, and many pvc  fittings such as elbows, were provided for children to assemble into a fun and wacky pipeworks. Half of the pipes and fittings were painted, and half were not. A flashlight was pointed at one end, and the children looked at the other end to see if they could see the light. The children discovered the painted pvc ”conducted” the light much better, again demonstrating (or simulating) Total Internal Reflection.

The other STEM activities included looking at all of the hearts next to point sources of lights while looking through Valentine-themed Holiday Specs; making a bracelet with UV color changing beads and colored beads; and assembling laser cut pieces of wood into a box. I had much more to show the children but didn’t have more table space.