Dunedin becomes the country’s science playground for the next five days, with the New Zealand International Science Festival opening today for a run of more than 60 events aimed squarely at families on the July school holidays. This year the festival takes its smaller, more compact form known as NanoFest, and it runs from Wednesday 15 July through to Sunday 19 July across the city.
The centrepiece is a free Festival Hub at the Wall Street Mall on George Street, where science and conservation groups set up stalls that children can wander through at their own pace. According to the festival programme, visitors can play with light and sound, experiment with plants, look at insects through a microscope, get a favourite rock identified by a geologist, and even have a quick check of how healthy their heart is. Younger children get the Imagination Playground to build and knock things down, while parents can look over an exhibition marking a century of applied science put together by the BioEconomy Institute.
One of the quieter drawcards is a visiting artist, Sione Faletau, who will build a single artwork over the course of the whole festival using local data and materials, so the piece grows as the week goes on. It sits alongside a wider theme running through this year’s programme, which keeps returning to the point where art and science meet rather than treating the two as separate worlds.
The events themselves cover a wide sweep of subjects. Over the five days the programme takes in technology and robotics, marine biology, astronomy and space science, human anatomy, geology, botany, the study of insects, and conservation work. That range is deliberate, giving a child who arrives fixated on dinosaurs or planets a reason to stumble into microbiology or engineering on the way out the door.
The flagship attraction for 2026 is the Science Train, a travelling science show staged aboard the Dunedin Railways Taieri Gorge scenic service. The train carries young passengers up the gorge to Hindon, and along the way science demonstrators run a series of short lessons, each lasting about 20 minutes, on physics, engineering, forensics and the workings of the train itself. The trip finishes with a picnic at Hindon before the return leg. The Science Train runs on the final weekend of the festival, on Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 July. Demand has been strong. As of early July the Saturday service had already sold out, with only around 50 seats left for the Sunday run.
In the lead-up, organisers put the show through its paces with a group of homeschooled pupils who acted as a test audience, sitting through the presentations and giving feedback on what worked and what needed trimming. Associate director Jenny Chandler told the Otago Daily Times the aim was simply to iron out any wrinkles before the paying crowds arrive. “This is just a chance for another practice and we want to make sure it all goes down well with the kids,” she said.
The trial runs were also built to be welcoming for neurodivergent children, giving a low-pressure setting where a child could take part without the noise and crush of a full public session. Emily Frith of the Εtepoti Dunedin Homeschoolers said the pupils enjoyed being taken seriously as a test audience rather than just an afterthought. “They also love that they’ve been given the chance to provide feedback as well,” she said.
Beyond the hands-on stalls and the train, the festival also makes room for grown-up conversation. An Art and Science Panel picks apart how the two disciplines feed each other, and a Future of Food Panel brings together six people working on where the country’s food might come from in the decades ahead, from the paddock to the laboratory. Those sessions sit at the more serious end of a programme that otherwise leans hard into fun.
The timing is slightly unusual this year. The festival normally lands in the first week of the July school holidays, but it has shifted to the second week because of the way the Matariki public holiday fell on the calendar. For families who have already burned through the first week of the break looking for things to do in the cold, a science festival landing in the back half of the holidays is handy.
NanoFest is the pared-back edition of a festival that in its full form is one of the largest science events in the country. It has become a fixture of the Dunedin winter, leaning on the city’s strong research base, and it draws support from the Dunedin City Council, the University of Otago, the Otago Community Trust and Dunedin’s regional promotion body. The compact version keeps the festival ticking over in the years between the bigger outings, and this year’s line-up of more than 60 events suggests the appetite has not shrunk.
For anyone in the lower South Island with restless children and a few days of winter still to fill, the Festival Hub is free and open daily, and the wider programme runs right through until Sunday. RNZ noted the festival among the events getting under way this week as the school holidays roll on. Tickets for the paid sessions, including the Science Train, are listed on the festival website, though the most popular runs are already filling fast.
Are you heading along to the festival this week, or is a science show on a train the sort of thing that would have hooked you as a kid? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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