Montréal Science Centre

I have to say that after my experiences through Ontario and the rest of the world the Montréal Science Centre (www.montrealsciencecentre.com) came as a big disappointment. Whilst I said on this blog that I didn’t want to be negative about the centres I visited, I do feel obliged to add balance and say where good science communication principles are not well applied.

Montreal Science Centre

To begin with, the box office lady was friendly and welcoming once I started a conversation with her about yesterday’s Museums Day. As anticipated, the place was packed out, and it was a good day not to visit. I got my wristband and set off down the corridors to find the exhibition halls. The Montréal Science Centre is based in a long, thin building along one of the quays of the Old Port. As such, there is a lot of wasted potential as visitors travel and the signage isn’t particularly good. Some walls have exhibitions on, such as Cargo about shipping in large ports, or details of particularly inventive Quebecans, but I do get the feeling that a lot more could be done.

Here, like the Ontario Science Centre, there is some redemption. In some of the bathrooms there is more about the science of handwashing and facts about leaky toilets, so science is being communicated in these areas too, but I would think that this could be extended to the rest of the building.

It is sometimes seen that technology is the way forward for science communication, and many centres and museums do go overboard in thinking that it has to be on the screen for it to be relevant. Whilst in many instances technology can make a huge difference to the communication of science, misplaced technology can work against the visitor.

The Imagine gallery is a bold attempt to bring in screens, projectors and Minority Report-style interfaces to look into the future of science. Unfortunately this is where things fall down; the user is left waving their hands or trying to drag their feet across the floor to activate a certain display and the sensors seem slow to pick up, or get misplaced signals from somewhere else. There is also very little interactivity – the user is required simply to start things off, and the videos and animations run themselves to the end. There are also very few words, which annoyed me.

One area that showed an excellent use of technology was the idTV station, where people sitting in groups of up to 5 can design a science TV report, bring in all the expert opinions, vox pops and even record their own introductions and conclusions. It was a shame that the acting of the news journalist wasn’t very good at all, but that’s that. This is a fascinating bit of kit in an area that looks like Mission Control, and was truly well done. Sadly there were only a couple of the Interactive Movie games in English and I missed the ones I could visit, so I can’t comment on that, and Mission Gaia was in French and had a large group in as well.

Sex: The Tell-All exhibition was very good indeed, and has been developed by the Montréal Science Centre. It was very refreshing to see sex and sexuality treated with understanding and openness with various stations answering many different questions. Homosexuality for instance, even in the animal kingdom, was handled calmly and with perfect grace, treating it as something perfectly natural, including video interviews with various people from the community.

The main area it seemed for interactive exhibits was Science 26, a gallery full of what were essentially circus stalls for science. It felt bitty, not linked together in a meaningful way and a few of the interactives were not working; some just didn’t want to play by the rules – for example the skateboarding balance machine was impossible to reset and I found myself getting more and more frustrated with how it wouldn’t respond to anything.

It is here that I must mention the one thing I have talked such a lot about in the past about science centres – the staff. So far it has always been the staff that have made the experience, and here was no different. As far as I could tell, the staff were there to guard the entrances to the galleries and were pretty much bored, disinterested and chatting to each other. The vibe they gave off was not one of excitement and engagement, nor one of approachability.

The last thing I would say is that if you have a customer satisfaction policy, as written on the welcome sheet, why should your box office staff be startled and ultimately indifferent when asked for a complaints sheet? This made me wonder; in the centres in Ontario I visited there are customer comment forms and computer screens everywhere, and I couldn’t find a bad thing to say. Here however it was impossible to find such a thing and I wondered if there was a correlation. In any case, I was very disappointed indeed by the Montréal Science Centre and would quite like my money back. Sadly however I doubt I will get that wish fulfilled, based on what I experienced there.

Montreal Museums Day

Whilst fighting through the crowds in Montréal on the annual Museums Day (www.museesmontreal.org), I saw several excellent ideas that I feel should be shared with the science communication community. Firstly, the idea of opening up 40 museums to the public is a formidable one, and the queues I saw for the free shuttle buses and the attractions themselves spoke volumes as a result. Nevertheless it all made a slightly shambolic ordered chaos and people got a flavour of what their city had to offer.

Montreal Museums

What to do with an Olympic Stadium once the summer is over? Montréal’s answer is to move in to create the Biodome (www.museumsnature.ca), creating a tropical forest, temperate forest, underwater/seashore zone and cold zone for visitors. For someone whose country hosts the games in 2012, I think this is an excellent idea and a better lasting memorial than a bulldozer and some new houses.

The Biosphere (www.biosphere.ec.gc.ca), in a different part of Montréal was a testament to sustainable living. Built within a gigantic Buckyball (or Buckminster-fullerene structure) it took the visitor through interactive, child-friendly halls explaining about water, toxic chemicals and so on out to the top and how to make travel less polluting. At the very top was an exhibition about how homes can be made significantly better for us and for the environment; the difference being that this was child-friendly and realistic.

Also visited were the Chateâu Dufresne museum, the Saint Gabriel house (the oldest surviving house in Montréal from 1668) and the McGill University’s Redpath Museum. All the places I saw had outdoor activities for the visitors, an absolute necessity given the sheer volume of the public who had turned out for the event.

Canada Science and Technology Museum

In 1967 the Canada Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) was opened, housed in a former bakery warehouse. Now one corporation oversees three museums in the city: the Museum of Agriculture, the Museum of Aviation and Space and the Museum of Science and Technology, the last of which still resides in that bakery warehouse, from which they are still looking to move even 43 years on. You can read more about the museum online at http://www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca/english/about/CSTM_Origins.cfm

It was created by a governmental decree; this was the place where Canada’s historical scientific and technological artefacts were to be held and showcased, where it should be shown how science and technology formed Canada and the stories of Canadian heritage could be told. The museum does admirably at this task, and the first thing you encounter as you enter the museum is a big exhibition all about Canadian inventors and how we can also be innovative too.

Canada Science and Technology Museum

This was my first science museum – the previous entries have been about science centres – and it was interesting for me to see the difference in styles between the two. It must be remembered that museums have a collection of pieces that it is up to them to put on display to tell a history; science centres can exist purely on creating new exhibits based on the ideas they want to portray. Ideally there would be a balance between the two – at the Ontario Science Centre I was told that they were looking to bring some objects into exhibitions to show in practice the science that the public was discovering there, and I think science museums can easily use more innovation to engage the public.

Whilst I know that CSTM has only about 2-3% of its collection on show, I do feel that they suffer from a bit of glass case syndrome. Whilst talking to one of the curators I was told that they employ a range of interpretation strategies, from hands-on to text and videos. The staff are fluently bilingual and it was interesting to go around and ask them what their favourite exhibit was, because that shows that they are enthusiastic about their jobs.

It is here I must strike a note of caution, as I was told by one of the staff that they feel underused in some ways in the museum. Unlike Sudbury and Toronto, exhibitions are created by the ‘backroom’ staff, leaving the floor staff purely there as interpreters for the public. According to one worker, their ideas are disregarded completely even though they are the ones on the floor interacting with the public, which is sadly a trait I have seen elsewhere in science museums.

Nevertheless there is a balance to be struck as ever, and CSTM does it in a way that is full of integrity for the curatorial method. Some pieces are collection simply for preservation but not display; other are displayed and some of the problems of putting them on display become useful talking points for discovering the history of the pieces. For example, when showing the inside of a piece, a light was needed, but a light would also damage it over time. A button is chosen for illuminating it for a short time, but that is also used as a way to ask visitors why they think that is the case – problem turned into engagement strategy!

CSTM is a museum for the whole country, and as such needs to serve all four-and-a-half time zones. The internet and new media play a large part in this, and the website contains many education packages for schools and individuals. They have started creating bilingual films about objects within the collection and uploading them to Youtube, which I think is an excellent way to get to see more than just what’s on show in Ottawa. There is also a drive within the museum to find a place on the internet, through social networking, Twitter and so on, and maintain a solid presence.

The museum also owns a mobile planetarium, which is used for schools, camps and evening sessions. It also owns a 15in telescope that is on display and can be viewed on request. Specialised staff provide an expert and fun interpretation for visitors as needed. They also host Café Scientifique meetings on the last Tuesday of each month and Twitter plays a large part in this. The overall thrust in the new media sphere is that they are not there to keep control of their collection, but to be catalysts for dialogue about it, and I think they’ve got exactly the right idea there. Trying to hold back information on the internet is like nailing oxygen to the wall; the best way to use it is to let the air flow freely to enrich the world and let it come back to you in time.

A science museum, as I said, is a different beast from a science centre. It must be said however that no amount of words or interactives will replace the extremely important role that staff play in the visitor experience. It is therefore important to note that those people you meet on the floors must be engaged with their surroundings rather than merely guarding it against the rabble. Science centres do it well by getting the staff to design the space and what goes in it; science museums, in my view, would do well to consider something similar.

CSTM is a good science museum with some excellent interaction strategies, some of the newer exhibitions such as the digital exhibition are particularly well thought-out and designed. It is also extremely good to see a sense of humour within exhibits, and in terms of making Canadians proud of their scientific and technological heritage, I can wholeheartedly recommend the fun, bold and professional way that CSTM works. Well worth a visit!

SNOLAB

In 2003 I wrote a dissertation for degree about the Solar Neutrino Problem and cited (amongst others) Superkamiokande and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Little did I know that seven years later I would be visiting one and talking about the other. It was only a message I sent through the science communication community lists about this blog and project that got me here in the first place; someone emailed me back to say that they worked at Science North and that I should visit, and as a result I found myself in the most incredible lab environment I have ever seen.

You can see my thoughts and feelings about the day on my personal blog entitled ‘2km’ at http://davidault.blogspot.com but here I want to mention some of the science behind the day too and pay homage to the feat of engineering and pioneering skill that I witnessed. It must also be mentioned that work is underway to quadruple the lab’s working space; this too is an eye-opening operation that deserves trumpeting.

SNOLAB

Laboratories, especially those trying to spot minute flashes of light from almost massless particles on their rare interactions with matter, have to be absolutely pristine places. SNOLAB is no different; the air inside the ‘clean’ area of the lab is the same quality, contaminants-wise, as a hospital operating theatre. To accomplish this, large air filters are installed to trap particulates in the atmosphere inside the clean areas. SNOLAB however has another major obstacle to contend with in this regard; it is 6800ft down a working mine, and a similar distance along a very dirty, muddy drift before even reaching the lab.

Everyone must go through the strict protocols of showering before entry into the lab. Your mine clothes are left at the entrance and you are given a set of overalls and boots in which to walk around the clean area, along with a hair band, hard-hat and safety goggles. Blue sticky plastic is laid down at each doorway to trap any dust that may have made its way onto your boots. But why is something as simple as dust so much of a problem in any case? The answer is that down in the rock the dust contains more radioactive particles that, if found in the wrong place, could cause false detections in the experiments.

The original SNO experiment was decommissioned in 2007, but since then the work has moved forward to build on the successes of that original experiment. SNO+ is going to take the original SNO and put a liquid scintillator in place of the heavy water, a task that will require the inversion of the tethering filaments (due to liquid scintillator being lighter than the water around it, heavy water being unsurprisingly the opposite) – again no mean feat.

I should add, at this point, another interesting point of engineering for the company; the cage that ferries the workers down the mine is small, and is designed to fit 44 men in rows of four shoulder-to-shoulder. It is in this space that all equipment must fit or, if necessary, hang beneath the cage – in this instance though the item must be able to be pulled through the opening at operating level. Every piece of equipment must also be cleaned meticulously once it gets into the clean area, or arrive bagged up.

I cannot imagine how many trips were needed to get all the equipment down the mines, nor how many continue to happen each day as the new work is taking place. There are new experiments to search for dark matter particles – PICASSO and DEAP-3600 – and one for a supernova early-warning system called HALO. Many other scientific groups want to use the facility, shielded as it is from cosmic rays by 2km of rock, to collect data, and this is part of the reason behind the expansion.

There will be more information about the SNOLAB and its history from my guide, Dr Fraser Duncan on a future episode of the Jodcast. Suffice it to say, this was a tour of a facility that I will never forget, a chance to see building work happening in challenging surroundings and all thanks to the science communication community. To those of you who read this blog, thank you ever so much, and to Samatha Kuula and Fraser Duncan, my guides, and to Paul Arkilander, my host and chauffeur for the day, my deepest gratitude.

Science North and Dynamic Earth

On the basis of what I saw in Toronto, Ontario Science Centre is a world-class facility for science communication. The trouble with the world, however, is that it is extremely large and if one wanted to get to The Ontario Science Centre from, say, Sudbury, it’s a 5-hour drive there and a similar one back, which isn’t that great for northern Ontario – and as you live further and further north, that 5 hours can increase up to 12 or so. No, northern Ontario needs its own science centre and it is the often overlooked city of Sudbury that has stepped up to that plate.

Science North and Dynamic Earth

Originally merely a staging post between East and West, or a stopover point when travelling by coach from Toronto to Vancouver, Sudbury is an extremely important geological area in its own right. Mined since the late 19th century for its nickel reserves and recognised as the site of an ancient meteorite impact, the city was an ideal choice for northern Ontario’s science centres. In fact, the centres rely heavily and play well with the ideal of the ‘local’ centre.

INCO, the mining company most recently in charge of mining in Sudbury, were at the heart of getting the centres up and running. Whilst it was being built the public were allowed to come in and see the site at weekends, to see how construction was faring. After all, Dynamic Earth is all about mining and Science North uses tunnels to get from one building to the next, and this was a great way for INCO to give the all-important feeling of ownership onto the local community. Once opened in 1984, the centre went from strength to strength, keeping that ‘local’ idea.

The staff, just as in Toronto, are friendly and helpful; dependent on training, they can be anywhere from doing public shows (such as lighting methane bubbles and dropping potassium in water – I was assured that a bigger public programme occurred at weekends) to the more specialised areas or in the planetarium. Some are found on the animal level, demonstrating the local fauna for northern Ontario along with the various climate changes you find there. All the animals housed within the centre are rescue animals that couldn’t survive in the wild.

One excellent idea I found was that the local university, Laurentian, collaborates with the centre to offer the science communication course, on which students learn about how best to work in that environment and design new exhibits which are then used in the centre. There are also more staff hired specifically to make new exhibits, but this is not done in a back room; it is done on the floors where the public can interact with the prototypes and the staff, which I think is an excellent idea. Once again this demonstrates a great deal of passion, enthusiasm and ownership from the staff and a trust of those people who work there.

This trust that gives a lot of autonomy to the presenters also translates to the visitors. For example, whereas in some centres microscopes can only be used with ‘official’ slides, here anything can be put under the lens. That kind of trust in the public is rare and achieves good results, as far as I can see, despite the risks. In fact, another of my favourite exhibits from Science North was the erosion table, where you can build hills and channels to take the rain when it falls heavily upstream (see photos). It was designed so that children could work together and create something together, though apparently more adults than children use it! There is also the ‘cyberzone’ where children can play with telephones and a Nintendo Wii if needs be.

The team behind the centres trade well on their ‘Object Theatres’, from the Nickel City Stories and Refining Theatres at the Dynamic Earth site to the Great Lakes and Club Génome at Science North. These multimedia exhibits combine music, narration, acting and video with objects placed and variously lit throughout the audience’s space, right down to the seats. In the Great Lakes show we sat on pinewood benches and Club Génome was a cheesy, colourful 70s bar complete with appropriate stools. The simple addition of objects really transforms a video into much more of an experience; I’m just sorry I won’t be there to see the Dark Matter one which will open in June.

Science North has a 36-seater planetarium running Digistar 3; I was surprised to see that they had downloaded the Autumn Little List of Constellations from the Digistar Users Group so could enjoy hearing myself sing through the angled dome. It has two projectors and they run a mixture of live and automated shows, with new shows being worked on as the summer progresses.

As I said earlier, whilst Science North trades heavily on the idea of the ‘local’ science centre, they do send a lot of things out on tour to remote places in northern Ontario, from where students cannot get down easily. They have a 6m mobile planetarium and various web resources for teachers and the public. Obviously it is best to get to see how well the designers have used the landscape around them and its uniqueness to create centres that have a real feel of ownership and friendliness. Dynamic Earth, for instance, uses old mining tunnels to show how mining used to be 100 years and 50 years ago. A lot of good thought has gone into them.

My only problems with the centres was the lack of a shuttle bus between the two, although given that no-one would really use public transport to get to either, I can understand that. It is also difficult to see both centres in one day – I would have loved to see a lot more of the Science North centre, but time was pressing to see the mines. Also, I’m not unfit, or at least I don’t think so, but I found that all the attainment scores for the fitness tests in the Body Zone must have been created for androids or similar. Each time I was well subnormal, fitness-wise. Maybe I just am!

Sudbury is a city that has moved from a more mining-based economy to one of science, but in terms of the centres and of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. The mining has not gone away from the town, however much the striking workers try to push it, but has now been taken up and given a new lease of life for the public to see what has been going on beneath their city. Long may it continue. This is a city in which Ontario can feel a lot of pride.

Woodstock Museum

Whilst I admit that this blog was originally going to be for science centres and planetaria, I feel that the museum community would benefit from hearing about the Woodstock Museum in Ontario, Canada. Woodstock is a small city of just over 35,000 people and rests on the 401 Highway between London and Toronto.

Woodstock Museum

The museum is city-funded, meaning that entrance is free, and most of its visitors come from Woodstock and the Oxford County around it. When I went in, I saw that one whole gallery had been renovated and within that I found an extremely well laid-out set of exhibits with an excellent balance of words and interactivity. George "Washington" Jones, the old town crier, leads you around the gallery with various games and quizzes for all ages.

What I like about the museum is that is does not shy away from using words, because when I spoke to two of the curators, Stephen Smith and Karen Houston, they told me that they had done their research. They went around the museums within a two-hour radius of Woodstock, taking photos and deciding what they thought worked well, and what didn't. In choosing to put lots of text on the boards, they decided to put the bare essentials of what was needed within the first paragraph, which was then expanded upon in the rest of the text should anyone want to read on.

Their upgrades have been modest as well, but sensibly done. Because they are city-funded they don't have a great budget to work with, so they set about transforming one gallery every two years. They didn't need lots of touch-screens or technology, and they said that there is an attitude within some museums that unless it's on a screen it won't be relevant to the under 25s. This they refute, and they can back it up with their experiences of the visitors they have into the museum.

The big challenge however is getting the local people in, and I think that this is a perennial problem for any kind of attraction. There is an attitude of having been somewhere on a school trip years ago and it won't have changed, especially if it's free and on the front doorstep. They told me the story of one gentleman who came in for a function and was tremendously surprised to see the way it had changed. "I was last here 15 years ago!" he exclaimed.

The other excellent part of the museum is that it is housed within the old town hall, but far from desecrating the place, gutting it and creating something new within the ancient shell, they have made the council chambers and so forth into an exhibit within themselves, making the building itself much more relevant to the visitors. Within the great hall there is space for temporary exhibitions, which in this case was one about waste and toilets, which was a fact-filled and humorous look at how we use water and what we can do to conserve it.

Woodstock Museum is an excellent way to spend a couple of hours within the city, and has taken modest resources and a lot of research and created a building that should really be in a bigger city. This place deserves more attention and visitors because a lot of good work has gone into it.

University of Western Ontario

Whilst collecting interviews for the Jodcast (the twice-monthly astronomy podcast from Jodrell Bank, available from www.jodcast.net) at the University of Western Ontario in London, I was treated to a tour of the Cronyn Observatory on site. It's not a large observatory or a particularly unique one, but it does warrant a mention on here.

London, ON

The observatory runs public viewing nights every Saturday evening from May to August, sometimes with talks from astronomers and a chance to view various objects through telescopes. From the telescope's website:

It currently houses three telescopes on the same mounting: the original 25 cm refractor and small Schmidt camera as well as 30 cm reflector. When it was built by the Perkin-Elmer Corporation of New York, this refractor was the largest ever built in the western hemisphere.

Pictures of this can be found at the above gallery, along with my personal favourite, the sundial positioned outside which is surprisingly accurate!

My thanks must go to Alex De Souza for giving us the tour, and also to Jodi Guthrie who organised all of the interviews with tremendous effort and goodwill.

Ontario Science Centre

It can only be described as an honour to be shown around a world class science centre, and I have to say that I really have been spoilt having this as my first visit. In fact, my tour will be bookended by what are seen to be the best centres on the continent - the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) in Toronto and San Francisco's Exploratorium in September. The photos from my visit can be found by clicking the link below.

Click here for photos

Basics

The OSC was built for Canada's centennial, opening two years later in 1969, since which time 44 million people have gone through its doors. It was designed to be three seperate buildings linked by bridges and escalators going down into the ravine created by the Don River, giving the feel of going deeper into the engagement of science. This cascade effect works very well, especially when you add that the linking tunnels have open glass walls allowing you to engage with the nature outside the centre as well as the science within.

Experience

One of the problems facing science centres across the world is the internet; why spend your free time and hard-earned money visiting a science centre when you can find out the learning online for free? This was the first question answered by my host, Sara Poirier, who is a researcher and programmer in astronomy and space sciences and has a sparkling history in science engagement. They have been using all the tools at their disposal to innovate and come up with ways to create a Next Generation Science Centre, offering an experience unlike anything online.

It is quite surprising to see people walking around in lab coats, but in goes to exemplify what the OSC does with potential problems - it takes them, turns them around and uses them to its advantage. The public is given a fear of 'science', both by the media and through the generations and so the lab coat can be seen by some to be a barrier, a symbol of that inaccessibility. It is, however what is inside the lab coats that matters. Here are no dusty, old researchers that only talk in jargon, these are young, enthusiastic communicators who engage, enthuse and demonstratively love their jobs.

The staff, I must say, are the OSC's finest asset. All of them are fun, friendly and engaging, and the first three I met on the bottom level were artists. You may wonder why science graduates aren't being insisted upon here - I can answer that from my university days. I was lectured by some of the greatest minds in the country at Cambridge, but they couldn't teach at all. They were trained too much in academia rather than communication. One guy I met was a theatre major and he has been given the opportunity to create theatrical pieces with another colleague for putting on in the centre. Another is an opera singer, and so on. The point is that the Centre is employing people who are naturally communicative and giving them the science; they aren't just taking scientists and hoping they'll learn 'people skills'.

What's more is that the staff are not left in one place to do one thing. All staff are on rotation, from presenting in the planetarium to being on the floors to enrich the visitors' experience. Here again the innovation aspect comes into play; as you enter the Weston Family Innovation Centre (WFIC) you are greeted by a small stage with seats encircling it - the HotSpot. At various times throughout the day a presenter will come along and spend 10-15 minutes talking through the issues of the day. These are found earlier by looking through journals and chosen by the presenters themselves. Here is cutting edge science being explained by the people who are interested in it, and this later goes into the podcast.

The WFIC is a dynamic public interaction space, designed for youth and filled with breathtaking risky collaborative works. The scope is awesome, the interactives very innovative. Where else can you get your face created in tubes of bubbles running from floor to ceiling? What about a cylinder of iron filings suspended in oil which can be magnetised by visitors playing a piano - or, more significantly, plugging in their MP3 player? What is most important though is that all staff from across the building, not just one space, are brought together to brainstorm ideas for this area. We need an interactive to do xyz, let's take some risks and see what we come up with.

This audacity and collaboration takes place within the Challenge Zone, where school and public parties are also given the opportunity to explore real-world situations. A group may be asked, say, to design a flood defense mechanism that is waterproof, windproof, quickly assembled and can fold away easily. They then go off, design their ideas on paper, take them for approval by the quartermaster and then build them from the materials provided. What I appreciated was that this creative process was shared by all staff for the interactives, both online and offline, and that gives a really collaborative feel to the whole building.

Of course, the web is playing a huge part in every museum and public space and like others, the OSC has the opportunity for visitors to make things in the centre and access them online, whether it be results or their stop-motion videos. One story that I was told is that someone brought in a chess set and did a 10 minute stop-motion animation of a game. There is also the feel of the public leaving their mark, with plenty of interactives asking for ideas and opinions - visitors contribute data, which shapes the future experience.

Engagement

Science purists may well be grumbling that I make so much of hiring actors to be the gallery staff and letting them run free to integrate the two disciplines. Another major aspect of the OSC is that scientists are brought in to do research in-house, on the proviso that they give a series of talks to the public during the day. The WFIC hosted a group of scientists researching youth issues with privacy on facebook, on the back of concerns that social media and networking from the centre could have negative effects. Here again the OSC takes a problem and collaborates to investigate it and turns it into engaging science. Another group came in from the Sick Kids hospital to investigate and explain genes and their actions.

The scientists aren't just in-house, however. The OSC partners with local schools and universities to showcase work via flickr and the galleries. A group from York University looking at solar panels came in to design a challenge for the WFIC's Challenge Zone and then could engage with the visitors who turned up. The centre also now host the annual Youth Innovation Award, which has just announced its second winner, who designed a way to refine methane from rural sources and make it usable as fuel.

The engagement is not just for youth and adults - toddlers are allowed an incredible experience in the Kidspark, and the OSC has brought students in from local universities to help show parents where their children are learning from the interactives. Here the whole family is included and shown where the educational growth is happening. This is also evident in the planetarium's new toddler show, which is just as much for the parents' involvement as the childrens'.

Space

Of course, my particular interest is in the astronomy and space areas where Sara and her team have done a marvellous job. The 50-seater planetarium has a Sky-scan twin Zeiss projector and a unique way of seating its 'crew'. At the front of the very intimate space are beanbags for those who want them, or there are benches at the back. The presenter for my show was Rochelle, who communicated the material personably, enthusiastically and with a lot of science, though this was not in any way off-putting. There was a good response from the audience, and justifiably so. There was a mix of real-time night-sky and presenter-led video, and each show as a result is different, because every presenter is different and can tailor their presentation to the audience they have.

Outside in the space section, the fusion of art and science creates a wonderful experience without skimping on any of the detail. Displayed is a quote by Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.

The meteorites are displayed in the style of a jewellery exhibition, like 'Tiffany's meets Superman's cave'. A piece of Moon Rock and one of Mars Rock sit in adjacent panels which the answers to their FAQ's for all to read.

With all my talk of innovation and new things, the OSC hasn't forgotten its older exhibits. The old planetarium projector is a beautiful old Zeiss analogue piece, but instead of junking it, they have enshrined and labelled it so that it provides a great conversation opener for visitors. The interactive that sticks most in my mind is a gravitational flyby simulator where a ball bearing is rolled down a ramp to a spinning disc, under on side of which is a powerful magnet, simulating a spacecraft being tugged by a planet. If you get the timing right the ball gets hurled to a bell at the end of the box; if not, oblivion awaits. It's an old piece that's been around for years, but it has been renewed and updated to show the ball as Cassini and the disc now shows Venus in orbit around the Sun; the waiting bell is Saturn. A lovely touch, rooted in recent science.

Others

What is great about the OSC is it doesn't seek to lecture you, merely to inform and invite you to play and question. The Question of Truth section talks about scientific bias and what role that plays in our definitions of the world. I felt this particularly apt, because it brought home the fact that although science seeks to find what is objectively true, it can only create a model of the world which is interpreted by our human eyes.

All around the centre, the interactives are well-signed with plenty of information for those who want to read it and short descriptions for those who do not. The balance is pitched perfectly and innovatively. There is even a small rainforest for exploration, and a drinking water taste test, where you can try different waters and vote for which one tastes best. An innovative way to keep visitors hydrated.

Science was, as I said earlier, everywhere. In the toilets I was confronted with a poster saying that men don't wash their hands as much as women and challenging me to redress that balance. It showed me also which areas are most frequently missed when washing, which I thought an amazing bit of engagement. The OSC is full of nice little touches like that, from the two very friendly gentlemen in the Amateur Radio booth to the transparent elevators and escalators which allow you to see the machinery within.

Online

The main OSC website (www.ontariosciencecentre.ca) is clear, informative and gives visitors the opportunity to take a virtual tour before their arrival. Special mention however must go to Redshift Now (www.redshiftnow.ca), which strives to be the science content portal for the centre, combining the elements of innovation with the research and engagement of the scientists who work there. Ken Huxley is the man behind this and he also presents the Redshift Report podcasts which you can find from that site or via all good podcast catchers.

Summary

I think it's fair to say that the OSC has a wonderfully unique way of engaging the public with the science that's in the world around them. I'd certainly love to work there, and that was evident on the faces of all the staff I met whilst I was there. It combines creativity, encourages personal development and really shows what can be achieved when staff are given the freedom to create and play. The fusion of science and wonder is perfect, the pitching level spot on. My only gripe is that it could be better served by public transport, but that's really nothing at all on the scale of how much of a world leader this place is.

Special thanks once again must go to Sara, Ken, Tyler, John, Rochelle, Heidi, Walter and everyone else whom I met there. I had an incredible time and left buzzing with ideas and potential. That is the mark of a great science centre, and all credit to you.