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Hands-on science and technology in South Africa

Posted on | April 18, 2006 | No Comments

Hands-on science and technology in South Africa
– 10 years old Scifest gathered tens of thousands school students to explore the science and technology

SciFest-eventis held annually in Grahamstown, in South Africa. Grahamstown is not a big city, rather a medium sized village, but idea of the SciFest is to offer Science education and unique learning experiences for the learners who would not have other possibilities to explore science and technology. Some school classes are traveling to the SciFest even from very long distances.

SciFest is the first of it’s kind, the festival on science focusing on the school kids but providing activities for people of all ages. The Festival draws close to 35 000 visitors annually, but on this 10th years celebration the most brave estimation on the number of visitors rises even as high as 50 000. The Festival hosts in addition to the lectures, educational workshops, theatre productions, schools quizzes, laser shows, talk shops, as well as other activities. This year over 200 workshops were presented and workshops varied from designing and building micro-rockets, creating multiple segment stories, photography and various other topics of interests. They provided unparalleled informal hands-on learning experiences for kids.

Some highlights:

THE designer of new Airbus A380 aircraft (that is the biggest airplane for civil aviation in the world), Dr Frank Oglilvie gave an brilliant presentation of the anatomy of an airliner in the SciFest. It was unbelievable interesting to listen how they have, not just designed and built the aircraft, but also designed and build the whole production line for constructing Airbus A380 planes, one per week in the future. The hi-tech expertise of many fields was needed in the process and importance of combination of the knowledge of various top-specialist is evident.

The nature of the universe was illuminated by Prof Eric Wilcots in his fascinating presentation titled “Seasoning the Universe with a little bit of SALT“. SALT stands for Southern African Large Telescope. SALT provided the unprecedented information on starts, galaxies and on the nature and born of the universe. The space, different solar systems and galaxies have always captivated the interest of human mind. Also at the end of this presentation, kids have extremely interesting and relevant questions to present to the lecturer on the topic.

“Science and technology is the future – also (/especially) in Africa”

Category: Blandat

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