Bay Area Science Festival kicks off Saturday, continues through Nov. 6

Aiming to get kids — and even adults — excited about science, the Bay Area Science Festival kicks off Saturday with the first of more than 100 events.
Geology, biology, music, hawk banding, genetics — and that’s just day one. In all, there are more than 100 free events, including lectures, exhibitions, concerts and a science pub crawl from San Jose to Santa Rosa, through Nov. 6.
Backers of the Bay Area Science Festival — ranging from the University of California, San Francisco, and the life sciences industry trade group BayBio to Chevron and the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation — hope the festival is just the beginning of building excitement about the sciences. Many of those supporters already have been busy trying to beef up the region’s efforts around so-called STEM education, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.