Celebrate 15 Years of the SciTech Festival

The amazing Arizona SciTech Festival turns a decade-and-a-half this season and offers free STEM fun for everyone! This celebration of science, tech, engineering and math is going on throughout the state and will get you thinking and smiling if you’re 3 to 103.

Whether you’re interested in exploring space, AI, gaming, healthcare and medicine, wildlife and the environment, or equations and calculations, Arizona is showcasing the cool side of STEM.

But this festival and its great variety of events and presentations aren’t just fun and games. They’re also about setting kids and the state on a good TRAJECTORY. Jobs in STEM fields tend to be quality positions, and institutions like ASU and the UofA, tech companies like Intel and Cox, and municipalities trying to attract those kinds of businesses all need STEM-savvy people.

Letting young people know about promising fields and how they can PURSUE their interests is super important. That’s why so many organizations are long-time supporters of the SciTech Festival. “Children are our future, but if we don’t give them the tools and the opportunities to discover what that future could look like, then it’s kind of off. They have to have the opportunities available to them,” explains Brittany Sweeney-Lawson, marketing and communications manager for the festival.

See the AZ SciTech Festival section in the middle of this newspaper for more festival fun. The larger events are called Signature Events, where you might get to meet Nova the Gecko, mascot of the SciTech Festival. Visit scitechinstitute.org/events/ for the calendar of events. You can sort them by area, Signature Events or date. The Festival runs through April, but some STEM happenings run throughout the year.