iSCAN
Newsletter
Vol. 9 December 1999
The iSCAN Autumn '99 Meeting, Armagh
The iSCAN Autumn Meeting was held on Saturday, 16 October at Armagh Planetarium and Navan Fort by kind invitation of Dr Tom Mason, Director of the Planetarium. The theme of the meeting was Explaining Science Informally and the keynote speaker was Alex Barnett from the UK National Space Science Centre in Leicester. After some networking over coffee, the morning session was held at the Planetarium with three speakers contributing. Then everybody went to Navan Fort for an excellent lunch, more networking and three more presentations. On returning to the Planetarium, we enjoyed a show in the Star Theatre followed by a guided tour of the nearby Armagh Observatory given by the Director, Prof. Mark Bailey. Everyone enjoyed the day's events but we missed John Flynn who was indisposed. We are very grateful to Dr Tom Mason and Prof. Mark Bailey for their hospitality and to our speakers for their excellent presentations. Summaries of the six presentations are given below.
In addition to the report of the Armagh meeting, this newsletter includes information from Dr John Morris of the Geological Survey of Ireland about a new association of Mine Heritage Centres throughout Europe called MINET. We conclude with some news items and an invitation to members to renew their membership for 2000.
Education by Stealth by Alex Barnett
The keynote address of the Armagh meeting was given by Alex Barnett who is Creative Director at the UK National Space Science Centre in Leicester. Alex gave a stimulating PowerPoint presentation about the plans for the NSSC.
The NSSC project was proposed jointly to the UK Millennium Commission by the University of Leicester and the Leicester City Council. The Commission announced in June 1997 that it would fund 50% of the £46.5 million sterling cost. The Centre will be located on a 14.5-acre brownfield site adjacent to the River Soar and the Grand Union Canal. A population of 32 million people lives within two hours traveling time of the Centre and a target attendance of 300,000 visitors a year is projected.
The NSSC will provide a combination of educational, research and leisure activities concerned with space. The Visitor Experience will include displays, artifacts and hands-on activities designed to appeal to all age groups. It will pay particular attention to British and European contributions to space science and technology. A dramatic feature of the Centre will be the transparent tower enclosing several large rockets.
The Multi-Media Planetarium and Theatre will offer programmes which will follow the progress of the latest space missions. The theatre will be equipped with a Spitz projector, wide screen video, laser projection and immersive sound to provide a virtual reality experience for whole audiences.
A unique part of the NSSC is the Space Research Centre of the University of Leicester which already enjoys an international reputation for space research. The Research Centre will provide links to current international space programmes and will ensure the NSSC's continuing credibility. An example of involvement in current research is the CATSAT satellite being developed by teams at Leicester University and the University of New Hampshire. When CATSAT is in orbit, one of the two mission control centres will be located at the NSSC's main visitor centre.
The NSSC will include a Challenger Learning Centre - the only one outside North America. The Centres were established by the families of those killed in the 1986 Challenger Shuttle disaster. Each Centre consists of a Mission Control and a Space Module; in a typical mission, teams of children (or adults) assume the roles of scientists and engineers who encounter problems of navigation, ecology, robotics, etc.
Above all, the NSSC will provide a mixture of learning styles and rather than providing answers, it will encourage people to want to ask questions. The opening is planned for Spring 2001.
More
information can be found at the NSSC website:
http://www.nssc.co.uk/
Exhibiting Evolution by Rick LeVert
The Background
Exhibiting Evolution is an MA project in Visual Communication at the National
College of Art and Design and will be presented in the degree show in
June 2000. The project explores the tools of exhibition design - colours,
typography, images, materials, objects, etc. - and the ways in which they
can communicate and create popular interest in the natural sciences.
Exhibiting Evolution is first and foremost a design project. While it treats the subject of evolution respectfully and adheres to both historical and scientific accuracy, it is still an imaginary exhibition unbounded by the practical considerations normally attached to exhibition development and realisation.
The Birth of the
Museum
The principle of design in the 19th century natural history museum is
summed up by the so-called Brown-Goode method, whereby a display is a
properly prepared explanatory label - ideally it would have been additionally
illustrated and supported by an accompanying object. These labels and
their objects were devoid of a story, they were, in and of themselves
unimportant, their only value deriving from their representation of the
taxonomic order.
This style of design also propagated and reinforced the concept of evolution as being a movement from simple to complex, from lower to higher, culminating eventually in the birth of mankind. This view of evolution no longer enjoys much currency amongst evolutionists.
Rediscovering
the Principles of Curiosity
Exhibiting Evolution seeks to develop a new approach to designing
exhibitions on the natural sciences, taking as its inspiration the private
collections and the cabinets of curiosity which predate the birth of the
museum . In contrast to later exhibition design, objects in these collections
had a story, admittedly bizarre, eclectic and individually oriented. The
objects therefore were not symbolic of something else but were of interest
in their own right.
The ideas underlying a rediscovery of the principles of curiosity are based on the belief that developments in the sciences are first and foremost sparked by a curious interest in the world around us coupled with creative fantasy (the ability to theorise). The sciences are not too distant from the arts in this respect. Many popular scientific exhibitions neglect this aspect in favour of a very goal-oriented/question-and-answer format of utilitarian presentation.
Giving Curiosity
a Home
Exhibiting Evolution is set in the hold of a container tanker which is
simultaneously a reference to Noah's Ark and Darwin's Beagle. Setting
an exhibition on evolution in a blatantly industrial context also provides
a stimulating character contrast. The containers themselves house individual
topics in the story of evolution. They are independent of one another,
they are self-contained units in the exhibition and can be added and subtracted
at will. They can easily be removed from the main exhibition and turned
into practical, compact, travelling modules. While each independent unit
is wholly self-contained, there is a central spatial and thematic plane
in the exhibition - the evolutionary filter - which draws the individual
themes together in a grand narrative scheme. This filter is based on Darwin's
Beagle journey and is an adventure in the observation and discovery of
the dynamics of evolution. During his five-year journey around the globe,
Darwin's curiosity in the workings of the natural world led him to observe
and record almost all of the dynamics he would describe in The Origin
of Species twenty years later. The filter will not place emphasis on the
dynamics themselves but on adventure and observation - it will be about
learning to see the world anew as Darwin once did.
Explaining Chemistry: no easy task by Peter E. Childs
Peter Childs pointed out that the reason for very few chemistry exhibits in science museums or interactive science centres is due to the inherent difficulty of devising demonstrations of irreversible processes. Since the essence of a chemical reaction is change, materials are used up and waste is produced. Whereas interactive exhibits illustrating physical principles can be used again and again with very little wear and low maintenance, those illustrating chemical principles are rarely reusable.
Other problems are safety and disposal of wastes. Chemical exhibits are usually costly to run because they use up materials and have high maintenance demands. Chemistry is also conceptually difficult because the visible world can only be understood properly in terms of the invisible world of atoms, molecules and atomic bonds. In addition, the language of chemistry (symbols, formulae, equations) is another barrier to communication.
The shortage of chemical exhibits in museums and the poor public image of chemistry have resulted in an important European project called CHEMistry for Life. The partners in the project are the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) and the European Collaborative for Science, Industry and Technology Exhibitions (ECSITE) in collaboration with sixteen museums and science centres. The project started in 1993 with an initial budget of 3.6 million ECUS and aims to develop 50 exhibits.
Details are available
on the CEFIC website at
http://www.cefic.be/activities/science-edu/chemforlife
and also on the Deutsches
Museum website at
http://www.deutches-museum.de/akt/koop
Mathematics
in the Taichung Science Museum
by Nigel H. Buttimore
The National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung is the second in a series of museums planned for major Taiwanese cities. Having been awarded the contract for the Taichung museum, the James Gardner Group of London, in turn, subcontracted to Donal Lyons of Procyon Limited in Dublin a project involving interactive computer displays.
Modules exhibiting mathematical topics in the computer area were to be located in the Numbers and Forms room of the museum, housed in five sit-in pods in the shape of the Platonic regular polyhedra. A group of talented students from the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science in Trinity College Dublin developed the appropriate interactive software on a range of Amiga computers.
The tetrahedron, for example, contained a module related to the bridges of Koenigsberg that invited a visitor to select a graph on-screen and to trace an Euler path passing through every edge exactly once, possibly using a vertex more than once. Also offered was the challenge of finding a Hamilton path in a graph that would visit each vertex exactly once, possibly leaving some edges untraced. The interactive module allowed a visitor to backtrack from an unsuccessful attempt at finding a legal route.
Some graphs were presented in the form of islands surrounded by rivers and mainland, the edges of the graph corresponding to various bridges spanning the water. Other graphs were displayed as the planar forms of the five regular polyhedra, all of which have Hamilton paths, but only some of which have Euler paths.
The pod in the shape of a cube provided an opportunity to study the Game of Life originally introduced by mathematician John Horton Conway. The dodecahedron invited a visitor to construct a planar map of imaginary countries with various boundaries and to consider the minimum number of colours, four in fact, required to ensure that no two adjacent countries shared the same colour.
The National Museum of Natural Science on Kuan Chien Road in Taichung opened in 1988 and its technical supervisor indicated five years later that every video display "in our museum has always been constantly occupied by our visitors".
Encryption has emerged as an important element of secure transactions, a technology that depends upon the mathematics of primes, numbers divisible only by themselves and one. The method of selecting prime numbers using the sieve of Eratosthenes to successively remove integers divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on, could have a place in a museum either in mechanical or electronic form. The further step of explaining encryption would, however, present a greater challenge.
Information about the Taichung Science Museum can be found at http://www.nmns.edu.tw
The Irish
Energy Centre's Schools Programme
by Sinead Begley & Majella Kelleher
The Irish Energy Centre is an initiative of the Department of Public Enterprise and is charged with the promotion and development of a sustainable national energy policy.
Shortly after its establishment in 1994 the Irish Energy Centre commenced the development of a programme for schools as it recognised that students are key influences in energy use in the home, and will be the energy producers, consumers, policy makers, domestic and industrial users of tomorrow.
It is important to teach about energy for a number of reasons given our current finite resource dependence, the environmental impact of energy production and consumption and the long term goal of achieving a sustainable society.
Resource Materials
At primary level there are three booklets for pupils available free of
charge to schools in boxed sets of 30 copies for school libraries. Two
of these, 'Energy Resources in Ireland' and 'Energy in Our Lives', were
developed by the Centre as part of an EU SAVE Programme. The third booklet
was translated from a cartoon booklet developed by the Finnish Energy
Agency, and is entitled 'Hey Everything's Working!'.
The 'Energy Conservation and the Environment' Resource Pack was developed in 1993 for use by teachers in second level schools for teaching about energy. It contains seven booklets on a range of topics, articles and an abstracts service as well as suggestions for projects and practicals.
The booklets and the pack are disseminated on an ongoing basis and demand is constant.
Projects
The main
project for primary schools is Energy Watch Day which takes place at the
end of Energy Awareness Week each year. Now in its fifth year the project
has attracted up to 16,000 participants in a single year and each pupil
receives a certificate. Each year a pack on energy is sent to every primary
school in the country which aims to facilitate learning by doing.
Recent projects for second level include Energy Link which twins schools with a local industry involved in Energy saving. The company develops an interactive exhibit to demonstrate its energy saving activities at a level relevant to Junior Cycle students.
This year the Centre will sponsor a special Energy Award for the Esat Young Scientists competition.
Energy Show
The Science Works Roadshow, a science communication company based in Tralee
developed an 'Energy Show' commissioned by the Irish Energy Centre. The
show covers various aspects of energy and it tours schools all year round
as well as at special events.
Explaining Physics by Raymond Greer
Raymond Greer traced the recent history of, and suggested reasons for, the falling numbers of university students taking Physics degrees and progressing to postgraduate research in Physics. He discussed the consequences of this for university teaching of the subject and the actions being taken at both school and university to remedy the situation. He suggested that the problem had acquired a social or cultural dimension, that there was a need to raise the public profile of science in general and that in this respect Interactive Science Centres could play an important part.
The QUB Physics Department has a long tradition of involvement in promotions of science and, since 1991, has managed several on campus. Whilst these promotions have proved extremely popular with both pupils and parents, there was little evidence yet that they had significantly affected the numbers of students progressing to science at A-level or university. It was undeniable that Interactive Science Centres would stimulate curiosity in science but any translation of that curiosity into studying science or making careers in science would be long-term. He hoped that the success of the growing number of Centres would be judged, not just in commercial terms, but against criteria which reflected the extent to which they met their educational objectives. In this latter respect, careful monitoring and evaluation of post-visit reactions would be essential and would be useful additionally in critically informing the way in which successful exhibits should be designed or presented.
What is MINET? by John Morris
The MINET partnership has been established to foster and promote a permanent association of Mine Heritage Centres throughout Europe. Six partners (see below) drawn from five European countries, have participated in a pilot programme, which has the following objectives:
Actions undertaken or to be undertaken by the partnership include:
A conference, Mine Heritage and Tourism: a hidden resource was held in Nenagh, 3-6 November, 1999. The conference was opened by Mr Michael Smith, T.D., Minister for Defence. The conference sought to develop and promote an appreciation of mine heritage as an industrial heritage, tourism and leisure resource. Presentations by a panel of invited speakers developed each of these themes, as well as including presentations by each of the MINET partner groups.
Mine Heritage is a relatively new concept in Ireland, yet in various areas and through various initiatives undertaken by individuals, local communities, and other organisations, there is a burgeoning interest in conserving and developing this facet of the national heritage resource. The conference provided an opportunity to learn more about what is not only an unique component of national heritage, but one that is truly international.
Mine Heritage is the cumulative technical, cultural, social and economic legacy created by over 9000 years of human extraction and use of earth resources. It is a legacy which has defined the earliest stages of human societal evolution - the Stone, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages - and underpinned all organised human industrial activities right up to the present day. We, as the inheritors of that legacy, are now able to use it to service other applications - that of heritage, education, tourism and leisure activities.
The conference was convened by the Geological Survey of Ireland, Shannon Development Ltd. and the Mining Heritage Society of Ireland on behalf of the MINET project partnership.
The MINET partners in the one-year pilot project are: The Trevithick Trust, Cornwall, UK; Le Centre de Culture Scientifique, Technique et Industrielle (CCSTI), France;
The Geological Survey of Ireland; Scopriminiera, Italy; The Arrayanes Project, Spain and the European Centre for Traditional and Regional Cultures, Wales.
The MINET website is http://minet.era.ie/
Museum Studies at Leicester
Apart from supporting the UK's National Space Science Centre, the University of Leicester has a Department of Museum Studies which provides both residential and distance learning courses.
Information is available at http://www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies/
In addition, the Leicester University Bookshop has a section devoted to books on museum studies. A 50-page catalogue of books covering all aspects of museum studies is available from:
Leicester University
Bookshop
University Road
Leicester LE1 7RD
Tel: o110-252-3456
Email: bookshop at admin.le.ac.uk
Museum Management Courses at the Deutsches Museum
For several years the Deutsches Museum in Munich has been offering successful one-week courses on the principles and methods of museum management. The courses are organised and taught by senior staff of the Museum. Presentations cover the main aspects of running a museum with emphasis on effective functioning of the overall system. A course in English will be given 25-29 September 2000. Cost: DM600 for tuition, course materials and one dinner. Accommodation (include. Breakfast) DM 62.5/night plus 7% tax.
For further information
contact:
Hauptabteilung Programme
Deutsches Museum
D-80538, München
Email: H.A.Programme at extern.lrz-muenchen.de
Space and Ocean Travelling Exhibition
Cité de l'espace in Toulouse has announced the availability of a temporary exhibition, Space and Ocean. The main object of the exhibition is to show how space technology can contribute to a better understanding of the oceans and how this knowledge can lead to the better global management of our planet. There are four sections: navigating, measuring, charting and managing.
Requirements: 150m2
floor space; 3.4 m ceiling height; 220v electricity supply. Hiring fee:
50,000 FF/month (7500euros).
Website: http://www.cite-espace.com
Further information: n.sangeroteo at cite-espace.com
The new EU Research Commissioner
Philippe Busquin of Belgium is the new EU Commissioner for research. Unlike his predecessor, Edith Cresson, he has a scientific background. He took a physics degree at the Free University of Brussels and spent several years as an assistant lecturer at the university and as a physics teacher at a teacher-training college before entering full-time politics in 1977.
He talks enthusiastically about the tasks ahead, in particular raising public awareness about science and encouraging school pupils to take an active interest. "We have to give them a taste for science" he says. "We need to find ways to bring young scientists together, and we must also give them role models." Busquin says that as a physics student his own role model, as a scientist with a social conscience, was the US physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Source: Nature, Vol. 401, p837.
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