Hundreds of patrons flocked to the grounds of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) on Saturday, as the 2023 Science and Technologies Festival culminated.
Arlene Weekes, coordinator of the 3-day occasion, hailed it a results, saying it attracted thousands of people today because it opened on Thursday morning.
Weekes, who is the Innovation Officer with the Ministry of Business, Innovation, Science and Technologies (MIIST), told Barbados Right now that the aim of the festival was to additional “popularize” and celebrate science and technologies.
“We are attempting to bring science to the people today. We want to popularize science and technologies. We want to demystify it and also we want to celebrate science, how it impacts our life since each and every single issue that we do has a genesis in science,” stated Weekes, who stated she was currently seeking forward to the subsequent science and technologies festival.
This year’s occasion, which was held beneath the theme Innovation for Sustainable Living, supplied the chance for kids and adults to engage and interact with the exhibits, which span numerous places of science and technologies, like artificial intelligence, agriculture coding and robotics.
There have been about 65 exhibitors from nursery, main, secondary and tertiary mastering institutions, as effectively as representatives from the private and public sectors and non-governmental organisations.
“The response has been phenomenal. We have had thousands of college kids pass by way of more than the previous two days and right now parents are coming back and bringing back the kids since they want to interact with the robot some a lot more, they want to do some a lot more coding and hands-on activities,” stated Weekes.
“We had a quantity of hands-on exhibits exactly where the kids came and produced several points – they produced ice cream, slime, bubbles beneath the tent and interacted with the robots and do coding and robotics. There was also animation, there was the flight simulator in the back and there was Patsy the Bajan avatar,” she reported.
The occasion, which was a collaboration among the Faculty of Science and Technologies at the UWI, Cave Hill Campus and the Division of Science, Investigation and Innovation in MIIST, was birthed from the then SciTech Expo, which was held up to 2020, but had to quit due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and 2022.
“We are back out and up and operating,” Weekes declared, “We changed it since we wanted to bring a diverse point of view. We are coming into the digital age,” she stated.
Exhibitors who spoke with Barbados Right now stated they have been pleased with the interest from each kids and adults, adding that they have been confident the nation had a vibrant future in the Science, Technologies, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.
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