Celebrating a Decade of Community Connection: Craft Lake City’s The Annual Craft Lake City DIY Festival Presented By Harmons

The GFiber STEM Building has been a time honored source of discovery and learning for festival goers for a full decade now! This collaboration has supported Craft Lake City to foster hands-on experiences and illustrate how creativity drives innovation across various fields. CLC  believes that the power of creativity is universal and essential to providing solutions in the science, technology, engineering and math worlds as much as it is for the arts.  

While the STEM Building has been a staple of the DIY Fest since its inception in 2012, GFiber’s sponsorship took it to the next level in 2015. That year, the STEM area hosted around 30 STEM exhibitors and it quickly became a fan-favorite attraction of the Festival. Over the last decade, GFiber has remained committed to making digital resources and technology more accessible to the local community in Utah, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to engage with and benefit from the latest STEM advancements year after year. 

The GFiber STEM Building has collaborated with Craft Lake City to create a space for makers and STEM enthusiasts alike, where everyone is allowed to let their curiosity take over and discover new interests. This space plays an integral part in building community for science, technology, engineering and math creators while inspiring the next generation to pursue their own creative passions. 

As a direct result of this partnership, Craft Lake City has been able to grow year-round STEM programming as well, teaching concepts like rocketry to Title I elementary schools across Utah through the CLC rocket launch program. Kicking off in 2022, this program teaches students about the use of variables, ratios, principles of motion, and more through hands-on, kid-friendly activities. 

At this year’s Craft Lake City DIY Festival, the GFiber STEM Building hosted over 40 STEM exhibitors, including local game developers, DIY Engineers, local tinkerers, nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. Across the weekend, there were interactive experiences for all audiences including Photon Glow Tent, Meta’s Virtual Reality headset, DIY rocket launches, STEM Action Center’s Pop-Up Maker Faire and Indie Game Day! Each day, attendees had the opportunity to creatively explore  the photon glow booth, play virtual reality games with Meta’s VR headset and customize their very own bottle rockets then launch them into the sky! On Saturday, STEM Action Center’s Pop-Up Maker Fair hosted additional local makers with crafting activities for the whole family. On Sunday, Indie Game Day presented festival go-ers with the chance to check out the newest offerings from nine indie studios and engage with the Utah Chapter of the International Game Developers Association of Utah (IGDA). These partnerships demonstrate that the GFiber STEM Building has grown in the past decade to both offer festival attendees and local STEM educators new and engaging opportunities.

Craft Lake City and GFiber are excited to continue this collaboration with a shared mission of advancing local STEM education and delivering cutting-edge programming in Utah. Over the past decade, we have been jointly committed to ensuring that all community members have the opportunity to engage with and benefit from these impactful educational experiences.

Posted by Angela Brown, Executive Director Craft Lake City