Canberra tradition with a twist
THE Year 6 trip to Canberra is a time honoured primary school tradition. But with interstate excursions largely off the table again, many of this year’s pre-teen cohort won’t make the pilgrimage to the nation’s capital as planned.
Luckily, all is far from lost. Canberra’s cultural institutions including the National Museum of Australia now offer free and increasingly sophisticated digital excursions.
Enhancing its own virtual experience has seen Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, move resources online for students, parents and teachers, all free of charge.
Questacon is an unusual case. The very thing that has defined its enduring appeal – its tactile nature – presented staff with a challenge when coronavirus first struck our shores.
“It’s the antithesis of many of the other cultural institutions that you find in Canberra,” said Anita Beck, Questacon’s senior manager, learning experiences. “Many schools will go to the museum and art gallery and the War Memorial and Parliament House, and in most of those organisations it’s ‘don’t touch, don’t touch, don’t touch’.
“At Questacon it is ‘touch everything’ and they’re allowed to touch, pull, play and poke.”
The COVID-19 era changed all that overnight – at least temporarily – but problem-solving is in Questacon’s DNA. The museum team responded by developing a multimodal, engaging digital gateway, including Questacon at Home, full of fun, hands-on science activities and safe experiments for kids.
The video resources are excellent, but don’t miss Science Circus Team’s written guides for budding scientists, including practical written guides for making air cannons and slime, or – for the daydreamers – bottling a cloud.
“We’ve turned a fun, hands-on museum into a hands-off experience that’s just as fun and just as interactive,” Ms Beck said. “Science is just really interesting and people get to see phenomena and experience phenomena that they don’t normally get to experience. That is fun in and of itself.”
The site also links to free apps for hours of fun – perfect creative distraction for those kids stuck at home. If design and puzzle solving sounds like your child, the Marbelous Ball Run app is a clever game allowing kids big and small to create, link and share virtual ball runs. Its advanced physics engine tracks the ball’s motion, right down to gravity, bounciness and friction.
Students with a school or family able and willing to have a Questacon adventure in person are in for a different experience too.
If this year has made the thought of space travel more appealing, you’re not alone: the museum fixed on launching out of Earth’s atmosphere altogether with Mission to Mars, its first Covid-compliant live experience.
“Visitors can be the first people to land on Mars. It’s an immersive experience, where they go from takeoff and launch, all the way through to travelling to Mars,” Ms Beck explained.
“They’re preparing, learning about science and the geography of Mars … (before) landing.”
The central gallery now boasts a startling 7m inflatable Mars, produced using real photographs of the Red Planet, taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The permanent and perennially popular Earthquake House exhibit has also been cleverly incorporated.
“You can feel the difference between an earthquake that’s pretty typical on Earth because we have plate tectonics, and the kind of quake that they get on Mars, which is significantly smaller because (it doesn’t) have plate tectonics,” Ms Beck said. “It is quite cool and a Mars sunset is actually blue, so these are the kinds of little things that we weave into the tour as we learn about Mars.”
Visitors should note that the pre-booked Mission to Mars experience is currently the only way to access Questacon on the ground.
While numbers are restricted for safety purposes, the good news is that means more staff are on hand to take care of fewer people.
“It’s almost like a private tour of Questacon. You do get a really personalised, immersive, theatrical experience that’s exciting, surprising and fun all at the same time,” Ms Beck said.
“It’s one of the only places where you’re allowed to be a child. We really want children to use that natural instinct of questioning and experimenting and touching and trying.
“It’s about capturing the inherent nature of children.”