The view up Century Avenue
After visiting the Plum Blossom in Century park on Sunday, we walked out of the park and took the north west pointing promenade with the long vista down Century Avenue towards the financial district, as far as the The Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. As a recently developed area the Shanghai leaders have taken great care to create majestic boulevards and landscape parks (Century Park was designed by a British firm). Once the air is cleaned up the view will be truly magnificent.
The Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology
The Science and Technology building is itself majestic, two huge wings sit either side of the central sphere. We went because we wanted to see where the Chinese were heading technically, but we were disappointed. It is a museum for children. Highly interactive – as many buttons to press and items to play with as in The Science Museum in London – designed to thrill a relatively young audience who enjoyed the effect of their actions but probably without any understanding of what they were seeing or doing.
Plasma balls
Bubbles Century Park
Perhaps this sort of place does engender a thrill with science in the youngsters it attracts, but it does very little, in my opinion, to educate. The whizz bang effects of interacting with a plasma ball I would suggest are no different from playing with a large soap bubble, which they were doing outside in the Park. Both have interesting physical properties, but when you play with it, do you care? Unless it is explained what is going on, it is nothing more than a fleeting game.
Giant Track Ball
But there were quite a number of games to be played here. Watching balls trundle around a giant track ball installation was quite fun and watching an archimedes screw in action was probably educational, but the whole thing was supposed to be showing different types of motion, which was probably lost on the 5 and 6 year olds who were tearing about trying to follow the balls. These museums have to have all the installations working all the time for them to be successful and this was not the case here. The van de Graaf generator was not on for example and a number of the exhibits had broken down. We wanted to have a go on an exhibit to show who could best control the movement of a steel ball through the use of their brain waves, but that too was broken. The section on robots showed robots dancing to music – but were these interactive or just preprogrammed to do a set piece – and a robot playing a piano. If I knew that it was sight reading, I would have been impressed. But there was no indication that this was the case.
Chair Miniatures
The section on design was empty and pitiful. A display of chair miniatures aimed to show the variety of designs possible for a seat and there were some machines that could print. But there was no working display of 3-D printing or anything to describe what makes a well-designed product. It’s nice to see that it appears that the UK is still ahead in this area.
Zhang Heng’s Seismoscope
There were one or two exhibits I found interesting; the display of large mineral rocks was interesting, but would have been better if their chemical structure had been displayed alongside to explain the shapes of the crystals, together with everyday items made from the elements within each ore. Also, the copy of the Zhang Heng Seismoscope, the first in history which detected the 134 AD Longxi earthquake was also good.
Sheep or goat family
Characteristics of those born in the year of the Sheep
This being the year of the sheep there was also a small exhibition about sheep and goats, which explained the differences between the two (the word is the same for both in Chinese) and noted that a vicuna and llamas are not of the same family but are in fact camels. There were displays of spinning and why the felt roof of a yurt is effective at keeping the rain out. This was all good, but not so good in a science museum, was the display telling the visitors the characteristics of people born in the year of the sheep. Astrology is hardly science.
No comments:
Post a Comment