The pilot edition of STEMming for you set the tone for everything that followed: take a genuinely interesting slice of science, treat students as capable thinkers, and make it tangible. The course began with the nature of science itself — that we build models of reality rather than reality itself — and then used light and electromagnetic waves as a thread to understand, and ultimately design, the technology of television.
Framed STEM as a way of living and defined science as knowledge built through the scientific method — empirical, systematic observation and rigorous scepticism. Explored the key idea that science gives us models that predict reality (light as wave and particle, gravity bending space-time) rather than reality itself, and mapped the hierarchy of sciences from mathematics to economics.
Explored the nature of light and waves — interference, reflection, refraction and transmission — contrasting Newton's particle view with Huygens' wave view and the double-slit experiment. Introduced wave–particle duality via the photoelectric effect, how matter absorbs and emits light, the visible spectrum and "colours that don't exist".
Detailed how electromagnetic waves interact with matter (absorption, scattering, refraction) with concepts like intensity, black-body radiation and using a star's peak emission to find its temperature. Explained Rayleigh scattering and why the sky is blue, colour vision across species, and the biology of the eye — rods, cones, the fovea and the limits of human vision.
Began designing a complete television system from its five parts — sensor, transmitter, antenna, receiver and output. Traced the camera from the 1920s image dissector through the iconoscope (1936 Berlin Olympics) and image orthicon to modern CCD and CMOS sensors, with the recurring theme of detecting and amplifying signals.
Covered the receiving antenna's tiny induced voltage and amplification with the triode valve, then information theory (bits, symbols, bandwidth) and wave modulation (AM, FM, PM). Explained why high-frequency carrier waves are needed, analog versus digital decoding, the evolution from 1G to 5G, and the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
Answered "can microwaves cause cancer?" by explaining ionising vs non-ionising radiation and comparing real radiation doses. Covered carrier-wavelength choice, channels and spectrum allocation, and radio jamming, then finished on display technology — RGB pixels, CRT phosphors, polarisation, and LCD through to LED and OLED.
