Optical and photonic materials play a central role in a variety of application fields including telecommunications, metrology, manufacturing, medical surgery, computing, spectroscopy, holography, chemical synthesis, and robotics — to name a few. The properties of light and its interaction with matter lie at the heart of this ever-expanding list of applications. The syllabus comprises the nature of light, wave motion, lasers, interference, coherence, fibre optics, diffraction, polarized light, photonic crystals, metamaterials, plasmonic materials, and practical design applications.