2025 was an amazing year for UNE Discovery Voyager. This year our team members have come from a range of disciplines, including wildlife biology, parasitology, environmental science, computer science, herpetology, neuroscience and palaeontology. Our diverse and passionate team brings their infectious enthusiasm everywhere they go – and this year it certainly has been a busy, fun and exciting year!

The UNE Discovery team has travelled far and wide visiting schools in 2025, not only within our local area – Armidale, Guyra, Uralla and Tamworth, but we also travelled to exciting places such as Lightning Ridge, Bathurst, Lismore, Coonabarabran, Scone, Gunnedah, Inverell, Coffs Harbour, Dorrigo, Bellingen, Port Macquarie and Sydney. We engaged with nearly 7000 students across northern NSW in 2025.

Our most popular UNE Discovery Voyager activities this year remain Creative Chemistry, Escape the Museum, Plants, Poop and Pollinators and The Magic of Physics. We also reintroduced a few interesting activities: Science Meets Art, Living Latin and Rocking Through Time, where students participated in our performance about the geological history of the earth and enjoyed travelling through time with Dr George and Sandy Stone.

We also welcomed many schools to our beautiful campus in Armidale, running activities and guided tours of the Natural History Museum. Visiting schools came from all over NSW – including Lightning Ridge and Sydney. Students are always fascinated by the museum’s amazing collection of taxidermied animals.

We are grateful to the local libraries in the region for inviting us to do our activities there. It gives students opportunities to be involved in our activities during school holidays. We really appreciate the support for STEAM coming from the libraries.

Besides school visits, we also spread our love for science through our pop-up science! We had a stall at the Armidale Autumn Festival, Armidale Creative Street Festival, Black Gully Festival, UNE Open Day, Council’s Halloween Night, Minerama, AgQuip, UNE Festive Flicks and the Christmas Markets (Guyra and Armidale). We attracted a few hundred visitors to each stall. People came to see fascinating specimens from the UNE Natural History Museum, our adorable live spiny leaf stick insects and mealworms, and our fun hands-on science such as square bubbles, slime making, observation of insects under microscopes, optical illusions and mini physics experiments.

Early in the year, we had a visit from Dr Kirsti Abbott, who was the driving force behind UNE Discovery Voyager when it was first piloted back in 2016 and for the next few years.  It was such a joy to catch up and share our experiences since her departure, and continue to inspire, play, collaborate, listen and educate the children and students we meet.

We also hosted the July edition of The Science Experience which was such a great experience for nearly 30 students in Years 9/10 who joined us for a 3-day science camp. Each day, students were challenged and excited by many different areas of science!  We’ve now moved it back to the January school holidays so we can enjoy a warmer time of the year.

National Science Week was, as always, an exciting week for UNE Discovery Voyager. We had a stall at Armidale Farmer’s Market and offered free play with our Imagination Playground big blue blocks! It was a hit, and some children spent hours constructing foam structures using their imagination. We then set-up a pop-up station at Armidale Central Shopping Centre. This brought fun activities such as identifying pollen models, observing corals, learning how to see sound vibrations and the chance for children interact with our robot, Rosie. We also entertained visitors with our science show which involved fire, magnets and a plasma ball. It was an amazing experience for us as well as our visitors!

We were also invited to facilitate activities for the OzGreen STEM Conference for Regional Girls in Coffs Harbour, and at the Sydney Science Festival hosted by the Australian Museum during National Science Week. Our Plants Poop & Pollinators was a hit with the attending students.

We also hosted the 2025 edition of Far Out Science, our science extravaganza where school students from around the region come and visit us for the day and take part in hands-on science activities with our esteemed academics and technical staff.  We had such an amazing two days, our primary day with over 550 students and secondary day with 350 students. It is such a highlight in our calendar.  We love the excitement of having students on campus and we love showcasing our excellent facilities.

The whole UNE Discovery team are greatly looking forward to 2026, and we have been working on some fun new activities to bring to schools next year. The first of our new activities will be focussing on building structures – can we save the pig from the big bad wolf? Another new activity will be maths-based. Students will be having so much fun, they won’t realise they are doing maths! We had fun developing these activities and cannot wait to facilitate them! Watch this space as we offer these and more next year.

We would like to express our gratitude to all of you for your support (and the invitations). The UNE Discovery team is looking forward to a nice break as the year ends, so we can some back bright eyed and bushy tailed, facilitating science activities and spreading our love of STEAM. On behalf of everyone at UNE Discovery Voyager, we would like to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday, with a bit of science and a lot of joy.

Yours in STEAM
UNE Discovery Voyager