University of Texas Permian Basin will host its third STEAMfest from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Oct. 19.
The event is free. The theme is Volcanoes, Fossils and Imaging.
The event is aimed at families, focusing primarily on elementary and middle school children. But anyone can attend.
Milka Montes, associate professor and Department Chair of chemistry, said the program will be all around campus starting at the Science and Technology Building. They will have activities in the Quad and at the Makerspace at the library.
Students from the Chemistry Club, Chemical Engineering program, art students and Geology Club members will build a giant volcano as one of the outdoor activities, Montes said.
They have a lot of community partners this year.
Ector County ISD culinary instructor Christina Scots a will be on hand with her students to make lava cakes.
The Wex Foundation from San Antonio is returning. Its website says the “WEX Foundation was founded to advance middle and high school education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects by integrating space exploration technology with project-based learning to create a robust space technology workforce that will enable people to live on other planets.”
Those attending will experience biology, geology, hands-on chemistry experiments and they celebrate imaging in chemistry.
“We will have activities for the kids to explore how we can do digital imaging, photograph, X-rays, all kinds of really cool stuff,” Montes said.
There will also be engineering and robotics.
UTPB Biology Lecturer Irene Perry said they expect 300 to 400 people.
Montes said there is preregistration and there were already about 100 as of early Wednesday afternoon.
There is a STEAMfest webpage at https://www.utpb.edu/events/2024/10/steamfest-2024.html
Montes said they want students to be engaged and to see that science can include fun everyday activities.
“… We’re going to have activities that everybody can do. Adults, obviously, a parent can also be very active. … The Makerspace is also going to be open so high school students can come and print whatever they want to make. We’re going to have Pots-n-Prints …,” Montes said.
They can make raku ornaments.
“If anybody is looking for a science for a project, for example, this is a perfect opportunity. If they haven’t picked one, they can see all kinds of sciency and engineering stuff …,” Montes said.
The event was created by the STEAMfest Coalition.
“We created this group of people because we saw the need to have a platform for kids to explore, and also because we hold a Regional Science and Engineering Fair here at UTPB …so this is kind of like a prelude to the big event. This year it is going to be in February,” Montes said.
Perry said the event also makes science approachable.
“… Some of our preserved plant specimens are going to be out, and we’re going to be using that to make different activities. Then we’re going to have our microscope set up with students there to help to look at different kinds of things through the microscope part of the imaging, and then being able to look at reactions under the microscope and also outside the microscope, looking things that you could see with the image that looked different and changes with that,” Perry said.
They will also have a tour of the Edwin B. Kurtz Herbarium, the imaging station and processing it into a public database.
The herbarium is for pressed plants. Kurtz was a founding biology professor at UTPB who got the herbarium set up, Perry said.
“Almost everything has been digitized and we’re about halfway through the processing of the images for uploading to the public database,” she added.
It will be on the Texas-Oklahoma Regional Consortium Herbarium. The acronym is TORCH and the website can be found at https://www.torcherbaria.org/.
