The Big Pineapple gets some science spice
Christina Scott
Bathurst, the quiet Eastern Cape farming town nestled in pineapple country,
and home to the Big Pineapple museum, will also kick off a considerable outreach effort to mark
South Africa's national science week from May 13 to 20.
The ten-year-old Grahamstown-based annual science festival known as
Sasol
SciFest will begin a week-long series of free one-hour-long workshops aimed at
rural learners across the province, with funding from the Department of Science
and Technology.
The SciFest rural tour might be a good model for science proponents around
the country to emulate, utilising the skills of local experts and universities.
Alternatively, people can go straight to SciFest, the country's oldest science
festival, online at www.scifest.org.za, to make arrangements for the national
tour later in the year, when SciFest will be bringing one of its most popular
guest speakers, American astronomy professor Eric Wilcots, on a tour of several
provinces.
This particular Science Week outreach programme will begin on Monday, May 15, with a team of four post-graduate science student volunteers known as SciFriends from Rhodes University, who will join fulltime SciFest staffers Tina
Moss and Wendy Fourie at selected high schools in Bathurst, the nearest town to
their base in Grahamstown.
They will take over three classrooms and run simultaneous workshops for three
teachers and 50 learners each from grades 9, 10 and 11, on subjects as diverse
as magnets, building your own periscope and growing your own vegetable garden.
"The magnets kit is supplied by Ginny Stone of iThemba Laboratories for
Accelerator- Based Sciences in the Western Cape, whose workshops at SciFest are
so popular that they frequently sell out," explained Wendy Fourie.
"The periscopes are from Adam Selinger of Australia's MadLabs group, who
has also run a very popular electronics workshop at SciFest for several years.
And the veggie garden makes sense because of the extreme poverty and
unemployment in the region - after all, we're talking about science in the
context of improving people's real lives, not science fiction!"
A day later the SciFest team moves on to the rural dorp of Alicedale, the
centre of the South African struggling mohair industry and a burgeoning
eco-tourism trade, where they hope to reach 150 more learners and their
teachers.
"The idea is to bring a bit of SciFest to schools which may not be able
to come to Grahamstown for the annual festival," suggests Fourie.
"Science is something that affects us every day of the year, not just
during the festival. And so many schools are still just teaching from the
textbook, which doesn't grab the learners' attention at all."
Midweek finds the team shifting focus slightly, targeting schools which
although situated in poverty-stricken regions have done so well at science and
technology subjects that they have been selected for the government's Dinaledi
effort aimed at boosting and supporting academic achievers.
"We only run the workshops for an hour at a time because the first round
of exams is coming up and schools are worried that they won't have enough time
to revise, given that there have been so many holidays recently," Fourie
noted.
SciFest will reach out to high schools in King William's Town on the banks of
the Buffalo River on Wednesday then move north to the administrative capital of
the province at Bisho, within view of the Amatola mountains, on the Thursday of
national science week.
Science week officially ends on Saturday but for the exhausted SciFest team
it will end on Friday in the oceanfront village and surfer's paradise of Cintsa
East near East London, after their last high school workshop.
"This year, 40,000 people attended SciFest but there is still so much
that needs to be done to communicate about science to students," Fourie
said. "The next festival will begin on the Human Rights Day holiday on
March 21 2007 and run for a week and we really hope that schools from across the
country will make it a priority."
More information:
 Christina Scott is Africa consultant for the Science and Development
Network, online at www.scidev.net, and contributing editor for
www.ScienceinAfrica.com.
Sasol SciFest queries can be directed to info@scifest.org.za
or
phone +27 46 6031106.
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