Approximate Reading Time: 3 minutes

We visited http://www.sparkscience.ca/ for the first time yesterday.

Everyone in my family is into science – in a BIG way. We also love learning new stuff, and we love having fun. This should make a visit to the science center a fantastic outing.

Where do I begin?

To be fair, we did end up laughing a lot – but mostly it was the kind of laughter you turn to when things are just too pathetic/depressing for words.

The number of squandered opportunities for learning science, or, well, ANYTHING is really quite impressive.

If you want to learn something about science this is NOT (!!) the place to do it.

Also, WAY too expensive.

The staff were friendly enough, but it seems quite clear to me that whoever designed the exhibits either does not know much about science or does not know how to teach it – or both.

Let’s start with the good:

The little kids’ play area is FUN.

There was lots of stuff to do of course. Some of it even had to do with science – though of course, NONE of it was explained. OK. It’s the little kids’ space. I guess they don’t need to learn about science.  (I’m kidding!) Of course THAT is the very BEST time to begin to inspire kids to be interested in science, but apparently not here.

I don’t know if this is what the exhibit designer had in mind – I suspect not because the staff volunteer didn’t appear to have ever seen this before. I think the exhibit is supposed to be a variation on curling. However, B., ever the creative and inquisitive one, immediately figured out something fun to do.

Alas, there were not enough of the right kind of wheels (only 2) for this to be fun for long.

You know what would have been WAY cool? Having some way, right there at the exhibit, to find out about the physics of what’s happening.

We also had fun playing with corn starch and water – there was a volunteer helping out who was able to explain some of it.

This was fun. A little keyboard you could play. The black keys change the colour of the light shining into a tube and the white keys make a sound while blowing bubbles up one of the tubes.

The number of missed opportunities for including science or even ANYTHING educational, is staggering. There are eight tubes – perfect for a musical scale. Did they match the notes? NOPE. There is no explanation with the exhibit so there is no way to learn anything from it beyond “It’s fun to make coloured bubbles and sounds.”

The arts & crafts stuff is also kind of fun.

It has very little to do with science though. There’s quite a bit of tech:

There’s a bin with pebbles in it and a light source underneath. The tool allows you to play with the pebbles and take a series of photos, thereby creating an animation. There were several stations that allowed people to make animations and mess with images. It was fun.

Not science though.

There were a few that were, well, curious:

I really have NO CLUE what this was about (see long image, right). There was no signage associated with it, and if you ask me, it looks disturbingly like it was taken from Sid’s toy collection.

And then this one (left) I found downright offensive. WTF does dressing up have to do with science?

The sign says:
Right event.
Wrong clothes.
Save the day.

Are you KIDDING me? What does THAT have to do with science?

There’s LOTS more, and I’ll talk about the main exhibits in the next post, but let me end this with one of the signs in the Open Studio. This exhibit has various random items on each side. The interactive part is that you get to plug a cable into one item on each side. You get to do touch, crank, or otherwise interact with an item on the left side, and your reward is that the thing you plugged your cable into on the right side does something. After a while.

What did I learn from this?

I DON’T KNOW. Certainly nothing about electronics. Or inputs. Or outputs. Or control….

The Science? SOOOOO disappointing!

— see part 2