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 accomplishment, saying it attracted thousands of individuals considering that it opened on Thursday morning.

Weekes, who is the Innovation Officer with the Ministry of Business, Innovation, Science and Technologies (MIIST), told Barbados Nowadays that the aim of the festival was to additional “popularize” and celebrate science and technologies.

“We are attempting to bring science to the individuals. We want to popularize science and technologies. We want to demystify it and also we want to celebrate science, how it impacts our life simply because each single point that we do has a genesis in science,” stated Weekes, who stated she was currently hunting 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 young children and adults to engage and interact with the exhibits, which span various places of science and technologies, which includes artificial intelligence, agriculture coding and robotics.

There have been about 65 exhibitors from nursery, key, secondary and tertiary finding out institutions, as properly as representatives from the private and public sectors and non-governmental organisations.

“The response has been phenomenal. We have had thousands of college young children pass via more than the previous two days and now parents are coming back and bringing back the young children simply because they want to interact with the robot some much more, they want to do some much more coding and hands-on activities,” stated Weekes.

“We had a quantity of hands-on exhibits exactly where the young children came and made several factors – they created 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, Analysis 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 simply because we wanted to bring a distinctive viewpoint. We are coming into the digital age,” she stated.

Exhibitors who spoke with Barbados Nowadays stated they have been pleased with the interest from each young children 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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