On the first day of camp, Cluster 5 was welcomed to their cluster by their professors Dr. Sahar, Dr. Tu, Dr. Peter, as well as their teacher fellow Mr. Barrows, and their teaching assistants Daniel, Karl, and last but not least Jay. After a sound orientation of two truths and a lie led by Dr. Sahar; the campers were instructed in proper laser safety as they would be handling light lasers all throughout their four weeks in camp. Even though there might have been a couple technical difficulties with the presentation such as cluster 5's speakers we made it through the presentation and on to Dr. Tu's lecture about the basics of photonics and light properties. After lunch, we returned to class to experience the lab portion of photonics led by Dr. Peter and the teacher's assistants, where we refracted a laser through a right angle prism and used Snell's law to find different internal and external angles. After class all campers gathered in their clusters to mark the start of another annual tradition at COSMOS; the COSMOlympics a competiton where each group creates a two minute skit surrounding their cluster topic. Since a main focus of photonics is lasers cluster 5 went with a Star Wars theme for their skit.

To start off the morning the campers were tasked with the yearly ethics project: to make a 5 minute long video about an ethical problem in our field, photonics. The most chosen topics in our cluster was privacy surrounding laser scanning and the military use of lasers. After around an hour or two of setting up our project we had a guest speaker, Mr. Rubin, talk to us about higher level photonics like specific crystal structures that allowed for things like double refraction in certain materials such as calcite. After lunch we were tasked with finding the difference in resolving power or the ability to differentiate two spots in an object in a prism that used refraction compared to a cd piece uses diffraction.   

Starting off Wednesday was a lecture from Dr. Tu about sources of light, as well as polarization. During the lecture Dr. Tu used some interactive questions to test our knowledge about his lecture. In our lab today we actually covered two different labs in one class. The first of which was polarization in which students used slits and holes to block an incoming laser and examine the area the laser hit the board at. The second experiment was made up of two parts, part one making a spectrometer and finding the spectral lines of fluorescent and incandescent light, as well as trying to match spectral lines of some gas to the gas itself. On top of this the students also visited the NANO3 lab at UCSD which is involved in making nanotechnology for UCSD in the fields of nanoengineering, nanomedicine, and nanoscience.

Thursday, our day started off with a trip to Geisel library to work on our ethics videos, we toured the 8th floor of the library where it is prohibited to talk at all, soon after we made our way down to the basement where we took time finding research for our ethical problems through the campus. Later we headed back to the lab to do a two in one experiment with polarization and interference, where we used some polarizers to learn about interference zones as well as understanding the function of polarizers in everyday technology such as glasses and lenses. After we wrapped up our labs we took a tour of a nearby chemical lab that is in the process of developing smaller ultrasound scanner for use in places like the dental industry.