Plans are underway to mark the National Science Week from 13-20 May, with a special effort to include students from rural and frequently poverty-stricken regions of the country.

The ten-year-old Grahamstown-based annual science festival known as Sasol SciFest is offering a weeklong series of free one-hour-long workshops at schools across the Eastern Cape, with funding from the Department of Science and Technology.

The SciFest rural tour might be a good model for science proponents around the country to emulate, utilising the skills of local experts and universities.

Alternatively, people can go straight to SciFest, the country's oldest science festival, online at www.scifest.org.za, to make arrangements for the national tour later in the year, when SciFest will be bringing one of its most popular guest speakers, American astronomy professor Eric Wilcots, on a tour of several provinces.

This particular Science Week outreach programme will begin on 15 May with a team of four post-graduate science student volunteers known as SciFriends from Rhodes University in Grahamstown.

The volunteers will join SciFest staffers Tina Moss and Wendy Fourie at selected high schools in Bathurst, the quiet Eastern Cape farming town that is home to the world's biggest pineapple.

SciFest will reach out to high schools such as Breidbach Secondary in King William's Town on the banks of the Buffalo River on Wednesday then move north to the administrative capital of the province at Bhisho, within view of the Amatola Mountains, on the Thursday of the science week.

The team will take over three classrooms and run simultaneous workshops for three teachers and 50 learners each from grades 9, 10 and 11, on subjects as diverse as magnets, building own periscope and growing vegetable gardens.

"The magnets kit is supplied by Ginny Stone of iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator-Based Sciences in the Western Cape, whose workshops at SciFest are so popular that they frequently sell out," explained Ms Wendy Fourie.

"The periscopes are from Adam Selinger of Australia's MadLabs group, who also run a very popular electronics workshop at SciFest for several years. And the veggie garden makes sense because of the extreme poverty and unemployment in the region - after all, we're talking about science in the context of improving people's real lives, not science fiction!"

A day later the SciFest team moves on to the rural town of Alicedale, the centre of the South African struggling mohair industry and a burgeoning eco-tourism trade, where they hope to reach 150 more learners and their teachers.

"The idea is to bring a bit of SciFest to schools which may not be able to come to Grahamstown for the annual festival, or may not be able to afford to stay as long as they would like," suggests Ms Fourie.

"Science is something that affects us every day of the year, not just during the festival. And so many schools are still just teaching from the textbook, which doesn't grab the learners' attention at all."

Midweek finds the team shifting focus slightly, targeting schools, which although situated in poverty-stricken regions have done so well at science and technology subjects that they have been selected for the government's Dinaledi effort aimed at boosting and supporting academic achievers.

"We only run the workshops for an hour at a time because the first round of exams is coming up and schools are worried that they won't have enough time to revise, given that there have been so many holidays recently," Ms Fourie noted.

The science week officially ends on Saturday but for the exhausted SciFest team it will end on Friday in the oceanfront village and surfer's paradise of Cintsa East near East London, after their last high school workshop.

The next festival will begin on the Human Rights Day holiday on March 21 2007 and run for a week and hopes are to have schools from across the country making this a priority.