Halifax Discovery Centre

The Discovery Centre started off as a touring science theatre in a van, travelling around Nova Scotia. It remains the only science centre in the province to this day, and still retains the local, community-based feel in a slightly rough-and-ready package. One reason is that the premises were not purpose-built or even designed. It was once a bar, the ‘Misty Moon’ and a department store, so as you can imagine it’s not a huge place at all.

Halifax Discovery Centre

Nevertheless, the Discovery Centre still manages to put a new exhibition on in the main hall three times a year with space for an inflatable planetarium. Science busking happens in the afternoons and workshops in the mornings and after hours their theatre screens HD films and can be hired out for corporate events, seating 65 or letting 75 stand.

This feeling of making do with limited resources extends to the floors as well. As you walk around you notice that a lot of them are sponsored by various companies, and the reason for this is that they lack the funding to do very much at all. What is done is cheap and simple, such as showing the speed of sound by speaking into a funnel, letting the sound waves travel through a long pipe before returning to a point next to your ear. Easy and incredibly effective, especially considering that we can see the pipe and imagine the sound zipping round inside.

Exhibits are brought from other places too, such as Science North. It doesn’t end there; they work with education students from the local Mount Saint Vincent university to train them in workshops and scientific engagement with school groups. They continue to do their community-based workshops and school tours with ‘Science on the Road’, maintaining that link with their origins and hopefully soon extending to Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

The centre is popular with locals and tourists alike, and uses some ingenious ways to excite the local media when a new exhibition is on its way. When the Monkeys were there, the centre sent a stuffed chimp to the local press, a Lego set when that one came to town and a candy ring when the current diamonds exhibition arrived. Their programme of summer camps and birthday parties is popular too, and when I spoke to one boy who had just been to a party he said that he had enjoyed it a lot.

The prize for me though was up on the 2nd floor, where the ultimate in engagement with simplicity rested. How do you get people to go around an exhibition about how science and democracy are related? The simple, brilliant way is to build it into a maze. A simple maze granted, but one that is fun enough to attract people’s attention and encourage them to go around and find the various stations. It didn’t require that much building – simple translucent plastic sheeting divided the tracks, which I thought ingenious.

My main thrust in these reviews is, as ever, the staff. Given the budget constraints and lack of funding, they do well with what they have. Everyone there is approachable and relaxed, which is the feeling I get from the place anyway. It is a friendly, local centre, laid-back and community-based, even down to the bicycle-powered radio, which plays a Halifax station when pedalled.

Whilst the building needs to be renovated – and finished – and some of the exhibits were made in the 1970s, there is a good feeling about the place. It does have a foot in new media too, with a presence on facebook and Twitter. So whilst this is not the most up-to-date or flashy science centre I have visited, it is still one that does its best with what it has in the perennial hope of some major source of funding somewhere down the line.