It’s elementary, dear children: science fair allows thousands to plug in, fire up
Thousands of animated school children from across the country descended on Makhanda on Wednesday for their first day of fizzing, popping, jaw-dropping and eye-opening science at the start of the 23rd annual national science festival. The theme for this year is Discover Your Element, which celebrates the international year of the periodic table of chemical elements.
While the theme may sound dry, the science at this year’s festival is anything but.
Scifest this year offers dozens of daily lectures, workshops, exhibitions, and quizzes.
It provides adults and children the opportunity to explore eye-popping, big bang chemistry in a proper laboratory setting, or involving themselves in cloning, laser technology, telescopes, microscopes, splitting atoms, splitting light or checking out the mathematics of traditional beading.
If that doesn’t take their fancy, kids get to make do-it-yourself desserts and foam gnomes and explore funky atoms.
They can build a comet, make their own slime, play with robotics and size up the solar system. It’s all about fact-finding, star-gazing, rocket-launching science.
Department of science & technology director-general Dr Phil Mjwara said in his Scifest message that the festival was about popularising science, engineering, technology and innovation as attractive, relevant and accessible.
He said the department’s partnership with Scifest was informed by the national imperative of significantly increasing the number of young people, blacks and women in the sciences.
Scifest manager Pumza Tshebe said in her message that the Scifest team this year chose to highlight the remarkable advancement science had made through the formulation of the periodic table by scientists such as Dmitri Mendeleev.
Dr Stephen Ashworth from the University of East Anglia in the UK, who is internationally renowned for his science outreach, curated this year’s Scifest.
Last year over 60,000 people attended the increasingly popular seven-day event.
Tsepang Thene, Thabisile Mdzanga and Lerato Nkholise from the Focused Combined School in Matatiele were clearly in their element.
“I have never seen so much science before,” said Lerato, who had bounced around from one fascinating exhibit to the next.
“Today I learnt about bacteria. We have never used a microscope before. We can see so much with it. I definitely see science in my future.”
Department of agriculture, forestry & fisheries exhibition representative Tshianeo Khangala said it was fun promoting the department. “We need scientists in the department.
“We need entomologists, food scientists, vets. Kids often think we are all about farming and they see that as manual, hard work. We need highly qualified scientists and we offer bursaries for that purpose.”
The festival, which started on Wednesday, continues until Tuesday.
We need highly qualified scientists and we offer bursaries for that purpose