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Dian Pretorius stood in his kitchen this week and bet his parents he could form a cloud in 10 seconds.

Told that was impossible, the grinning 18-year-old Colesberg High School pupil put a dash of water into an empty two-litre cola bottle, dropped a lit match inside, closed the bottle and squeezed.

When he let go, a perfect cloud formed inside - and he told his parents they had just witnessed an experiment he'd just learnt from a foreign professor that normally requires sophisticated apparatus costing thousands of Rands.

Responding to a theme of "accessible science" this week, local and foreign scientists unveiled experiments at the seventh National Science, Engineering and Technology Festival in Grahamstown that demonstrated almost all major scientific principles, using equipment no more sophisticated than corks, bottles, milk and pieces of string.

Festival officials, teachers and pupils said the workshops proved that - given proper teaching - the full science syllabus could be demonstrated and understood in even South Africa's poorest schools.

Molatoane Likhethe, spokesman for the Department of Education, said the department had already seen improved academic results with the use of "creative" alternatives to expensive experiments at 102 disadvantaged schools around the country, as part of the new Dinaledi Maths and Science development project.

Jenny Kinnear, national coordinator of natural sciences for the department, said a document would be released next month listing alternative equipment - often cheap household items - that teachers at under-resourced schools should use until laboratories were developed there.

"A teacher who is teaching well should be using these techniques anyway," said Kinnear.

"We are already running a number of projects for under-resourced schools, and using science kits which feature these kinds of things. But this is just our short-term goal."

She said new, low-cost experiments presented at the festival were welcomed by the department.

One experiment shown - developed by Australian professor Aidan Byrne - saw pupils wandering Grahamstown streets gazing at streetlights through modified, recordable CDs. Demonstrating the light-spectrum qualities of different gases, a yellow band of light seen on the CD meant a streetlight was powered by sodium gas, while green and blue bands meant it was a mercury-vapor light.

Case Rijsdijk, "science communicator" and retired scientist with the South African Astronomical Observatory, taught 200 pupils to make their own, non-intrusive "Bug Watcher" microscopes, using the top of a two-liter cola bottle and cheap lenses.

Rijsdijk also taught teachers how to track seasons and time zones - and even predict the position of the moon - using nothing but cardboard boxes with slits and drawn-on calibrations.

"Teachers must realize that, with outcomes-based education, they must use whatever resources they can lay their hands on," said Rijsdijk.

Tankiso Khauoe, a science teacher from Kokstad's Carl Malcomess High School, brought his entire class to attend a low-cost science workshop by two Australian professors.

He said: "It's fantastic; we can probably find most of the materials lying around the school ."

Dian Pretorius explained his cola- bottle weather demonstration: "The smoke from the match gives you the dust for water to cling onto, and when you release the bottle you get low pressure and lower temperature, and a cloud has to form.

"Our school doesn't need fancy equipment."