Launching an interest in science


(PHOTO: lcs9)

I don’t know where my interest in science came from. I can’t pinpoint one eureka moment in my childhood that made me so interested in all things science, I think it was just an organic process. But I can recall certain things that particularly stuck out, such as a series of trips to a museum exhibit in the Science Museum called Launchpad. The exhibit was in a huge hall with massive windows, and featured all sorts of interactive sciencey experiments you could do, like the big glass globe full of purple electricity, and I loved it. So I was really saddened when I went back a few years later to find Lauchpad smaller, shabbier and consigned to a basement. It was still full of kids having fun, but I can’t imagine it was half as inspiring as it was in its glory days. It’s being given a £4m revamp as I type, so hopefully it should be back to it’s old self in no time (and the big kid in me wants to go back and check it out), but I just read a news report that says that several science centres around the UK are facing a cash crisis, and that made me sad. As well as Launchpad, I was a massive fan of Vancouver’s Science World when I was little, and I think it too played a part in nurturing an early interest in science. Science centres are expensive to maintain and update and develop and run, but I personally think they’re very much worth the money. I just wondered what everyone else thought - did you like going to science museums or did you think they were naff and beneath you? Or did you love them too?


Posted by Katie on October 23, 2007 at 10:39 AM in
Comments 5 Comments   Launching an interest in science   Digg

Comments

My mother was the one who inspired my interest in science, and actually investigating all sorts of stuff.  I grew up in Cape Town, and remember my mother boiling up a dead chameleon in the pressure cooker so we could pick the flesh off and see the bones.  I was about 9 at the time.

She also brought home and dissected on the kitchen table, an eye, possibly of a sheep, and an ox heart, so I knew something of how they worked right from then. I’m still fascinated by that kind of stuff, even now. 

Desperately sad that science centres are closing, but y’know, you gotta spend the money on important stuff, like roads and runways, init? and if a few kiddies entertainment centres have to go, well lettem go to Center Parcs or y’know, surf the internet or summat.

Posted on October 23, 2007 at 3:01 PM by Rob Clack

I do think it boils down to having opportunities to explore science/nature as a kid with a mentoring figure.  We went regularly to the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium during the 1970s in NYC (a period when NYC was widely considered to be in decline). My mom never passed up an evening ranger talk when we vacationed at national parks or campgrounds. My first magazine subscription was to Ranger Rick (the Natl. Geographic magazine for kids). I’m strictly an armchair scientist, but I did send my husband on an Earthwatch coral reef study

Posted on October 24, 2007 at 11:10 AM by

For me, it was totally my dad. He is a biologist - a prof at UBC here in Vancouver - and science was just everywhere he looked. And being the giant kid he was, he just couldn’t help share it.

Look at that slug! (explains finer points of the biomechanics of slug locomotion)

Dad, why do they put salt on roads? (ensuing lecture on the chemistry of melting points in solution!)

It’s totally the people like that who make the difference - as does seeing science in the real world. Other than natural history museums, I was never really a huge fan of science centers. They were fun, but hokey. I mean science is everywhere out there..what do you need to be inside for?

Gawd I am cheesy.

Posted on October 25, 2007 at 2:00 AM by

I have to say my interest in science was my own… However, my dad was the greatest influence ever. 
He NEVER said I couldn’t do something because I was a girl, and he has encouraged me every step of the way… he even cried at my graduation (all 3 of them).

But I grew up in Oregon (outside of Portland) and OMSI was my home away from home.  I LOVED that place!  Where else can you go inside a gigantic beating heart!?  And then in the next moment you get to play with baby chickens. 

Until they moved OMSI it was next to the forestry center where you got to learn about trees from the giant talking tree.  I was facinated by the glowing xylem & phloem.

Posted on October 25, 2007 at 1:53 PM by

hi , very nice post

Posted on February 25, 2008 at 1:02 PM by travel to cape town

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