By Debs Begbie
New Zealand families brought their curiosity to Tauranga STEMFest to celebrate our city’s first, world-class gathering of innovators, educators, and cutting-edge technologists from the Bay of Plenty and beyond. Team STEMFest are grateful for the community’s contribution and commitment toward making the 12th October 2019 event a tremendous success!
With a fresh new city street and its powerhouse of incredible tenants, we literally took over Durham Street, Basestation, the University of Waikato and it’s just opened science labs, Trustpower, and Aspire2, to present 40+ exhibitors and STEM based shows to 3,500 enthusiastic visitors. Wow!
An event of this scale could not have been achieved without our AMAZING funders – TECT and Tauranga City Council and main sponsors Beca, the University of Waikato.
Other sponsors include Zespri, Trustpower, Sharp Tudhope, Priority1, Toi-Ohomai Institute of Technology, Think, Te Puni Kōkiri, Stratus Blue, Cucumber, Grace Team Accounting, PlantTech, The MacDiarmid Institute, Project Box, Enigmatic Global, xero, eurofins, ACG Tauranga, Comvita, and Basestation.
In thinking about the day and the key highlights, there truly cannot be only a few mentioned because in all honestly every single exhibitor contributed 110% with creativity in conceptualising how they would engage children and adults alike, to delivering enthusiastic and meaningful understanding of their STEM-based innovations.
Our beyond incredible team of volunteers demonstrated a genuine commitment to helping with the smooth running of the event, making it an experience to enjoy and remember for visitors and festival organisers.
In fact, the real highlight was seeing families come together to share experiences, be amazed and inspired, and enjoy with wonderment the best of New Zealand’s STEM heroes. Reports are coming in with families telling us that they stayed between 4-6 hours and there was still not enough time to do everything!
Thank you for everyone’s community spirit and we hope that Tauranga will see many more family based STEM events going forward.
From the organising team,
Tia, Mike, Marie, Kurt, Debs, Amanda, and Steven.
A small preview of photos from the day…
Photos courtesy of Suw Charman-Anderson – findingada.com
Other suppliers that we wish to thank include AEGIS Security for their professional service, Waste Wizard for amazing efforts going above and beyond what was expected and press and radio partners NZME.
We hope you will join us at our last two remaining STEM Debates:
14th October at Zespri’s new HQ in The Mount on “We don’t need more women in STEM we need diversity” – https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/we-dont-need-more-women-in-stem-we-need-diversity-tickets-74626867971
16th October at the University of Waikato where you will meet Suw Charman-Anderson, founder of Ada Lovelace International Day speak about “Ada Lovelace and the Invention of Career” – https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/ada-lovelace-and-the-invention-of-career-tickets-72350525369?aff=efbeventtix&fbclid=IwAR0z9VtE7B0RLlkjXGUwC3AMCqMIJuoYIRIaXVEAd2WW6w-j9Hke2qxlUZI