The annual SciTech Festival kicked off this weekend on Saturday, Jan. 31, at the Science Vortex at Cottonwood Community School.
Reporter James T. Kling wrote a general overview of the events and the motivation for participation by local organizers, which you can read on our website if you missed the print edition.
The kickoff event launched a month of events — a total of 75 — around Sedona and the Verde Valley taking place at Sedona, Camp Verde, Cottonwood and Beaver Creek libraries, schools, parks and other facilities, introducing our kids to the science, technology, engineering and mathematics that surrounds them.
The kickoff event featured more than a dozen local organizations, clubs and nonprofits, including the city of Sedona and Community Library Sedona, and about two dozen activity stations for kids to learn everything from water science and rocket aerodynamics to gardening, magnetism and animal biology. The adjacent Science Vortex was also open and the room is packed with kids and parents playing with the exhibits and science tables.
The month of activities run the gamut of STEM activities and officially while part of the SciTech Festival, many of the events and activities are open to adults of any age; they just simply happen to be under the SciTech Festival umbrella.
The Verde Valley SciTech Festival is one of the largest such events in the state, which is something we should all be proud of. The full list calendar of events is available at sciencevortex.org/vvscitechfestival2026. We put the printed calendar up on our fridge for our kids to pick out what events they want to go to on weekends and after school.
It was also great that so many nonprofits and organizations are involved in the festival in some way or another, be it with hosting stand-alone presentations, offering activities at the different public events, providing funding in some capacity, having members of local organizations present their knowledge to children or volunteering to help out.
Anything we can do to help our children get a leg up in sciences, to becoming engineers, to understanding the new technologies that we had to learn the hard way as adults and getting a better grasp of the mathematics behind it all only benefits our children down the line. Science, engineering and understanding new technologies — especially computer science — is going to be far more important in our kids’ lives than it was in ours as we move deeper into the Information Age this century. Understanding both basic and high-level mathematics and science will be key to all of it as our youth learn to incorporate math and computers into everything from the arts to gardening to athletics.
Sedona and the Verde Valley is full of retired scientists and engineers, technicians and experts, most of whom want to give back to their community and the younger generations in some capacity with their knowledge and expertise. The continued success of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the Sedona Center demonstrates that older residents are as eager to teach as they are eager to learn. Our young people are no different except that they are at the start of their educations and have yet to choose a career.
If you are a person with a career spent in the sciences, technology or engineering, or one that applied mathematics to make sense of the world around us, and want to pass on your wisdom to the next generation, attend one of these SciTech events, speak to the organizers and see how you might be able to get involved for next year.
There’s something wondrous in watching a child learn the components of a bird’s wing, how to build a better paper airplane, why magnets work or how an artist creates a tessellation.
