NEW EXHIBIT SHOWCASES SCIENCE OF BUILDING A HOME
When it comes to the building of a new home — or planning a new neighbourhood — there is a lot of science involved. And at the new Saskatchewan Science Centre exhibit, Building Connections, you can learn all about it.
“We’ve had a small house in the centre that kids could build up in the past. It was very popular exhibit. However, it was a small piece of our exhibit floor and it was the right time for a refresher,” said Saskatchewan Science Centre Director of Business Development and Visitor Services Ryan Holota.
“Saskatchewan has been in such a building boom over the past decade that we thought it would be an interesting topic to cover.”
In planning the exhibit, the Science Centre struck a partnership with the Regina & Region Home Builders’ Association (RRHBA), a group Holota said has always been a “fantastic partner.” RRHBA President and CEO Stu Niebergall, who frequents the Science Centre with his family, said the Association was eager to offer its advice.
“We were approached about helping to redo the small exhibit. I thought this was a terrific opportunity to think much larger and asked the question, ‘What would something much more significant look like?’” said Niebergall. “From there, the planning and pieces really began to come together. We were thrilled that Dream Development and SaskPower also came on board to invest in this great exhibit.”
During the planning phase, it was decided that Building Connections would focus on three areas related to home building − construction, neighbourhood planning and powering your home/community − and how they interact with one another.
One of the key pieces of the exhibit is a 200-square-foot house that can be built from the ground up.
“You can apply shingles to the roof, stack bricks on the columns in the front of the house and apply siding. There’s a child-powered conveyor belt on the side to take the shingles to the second floor and a chute to take them back down — so lots of interactive elements,” said Holota. “The entire house is built in such a way that it’s a cutaway view. You get to look at how something is run in a house: how electricity goes through a house, how a home is insulated, how siding and stucco are put on.”
However, building that home won’t do you much good if you don’t have electricity. Another popular feature of Building Connections is a large hamster wheel that visitors can run on and see what it takes to generate electricity.
“At various points in the centre’s history, we’ve had an exercise bike you can peddle to see how much electricity you can generate. We wanted to do something different. Visitors can get in the hamster wheel and see if they can generate enough power to run a gaming console or charge their phone or run a microwave,” said Holota. “It’s extremely difficult. The key takeaway is that we use a lot of power in the home for a lot of different things. If you had to power those things manually, you’d find the process almost impossible.”
Of course, building and powering a single home is very small scale compared to bringing a whole community to life. In the Mapping Mayhem section of the exhibit, people can design their own community on a giant floor grid with miniature buildings. There are residential and office buildings, a hockey rink, a garbage dump, lake and trees to represent parks.
“One of the things we find when people start with this activity is that all of these questions start to arise: Do you want to put your house beside the lake? Where does the garbage dump go? How do we fit everything into this place that we need and still make it a place that we want to and are able to live in?” said Holota. “It goes to show that there’s a lot to consider when you are building a community and it’s not as easy as a lot of people think it is.”
There are many other elements to Building Connections, including video footage of a house and apartment being built and a station where you can make a soundtrack for your new community. As Holota explains, the Science Centre hopes that one of the big takeaways from the exhibit will be that homes aren’t built the way they used to be.
“We absolutely do not build them the way we used to; we build them much better,” Holota said. “We build them with much better materials and much more efficiently.”
For more details about the Building Connections exhibit, visit www. sasksciencecentre.com.