Today, The Tech Museum president, Dr. Peter Friess, officialy opened the exhibition “The Tech Challenge Gallrey”. This exhibition shows to new visitors, more than forty totally interactive experiments prepared, narrated and explained by other visitors: boys and girls that have collaborated in this gallery explaining experiments on video.
This exhibition has been and is a learning process for all. On the one hand, kids close to the Tech Museum have learned by getting involved in the exhibition creation process itself. They also have discovered fundamental laws of physics related to light, mechanics, fluids and then have been able to explain them in their own words in a simple, funny and engaging language. They are the protagonists of it all. They appear on a video seen on a flat screen device behind an actual physical experiment that can be use in the gallery.
On the other hand, the Tech Museum professionals have been able to learn more things by sharing with this true protagonists of the museum and they have been able to share this experience with this special visitors. The President of the Tech Museum said that there is no better way to measure the impact of the Museum than to see how this kids are explaining scientific laws and experiments. It is a way of measuring not so much related to quantities of visitor but to the quality of their learning.
Finally, other new visitors will be able to experiment and understand science thanks to the videos recorded by other previous visitors: the girls and boys we have alreadya mentioned. Everyone, eventually could become the start of the “Tech Challenge Gallery”, because this is a process that is alive and well and will be kept going by all people involve, staff and visitors alike.
The Tech Museum will create a new lab, where boys and girls will be able to shoot their own videos explaining what they have learned while performing experiments and other activities in the center.
This exhibition, however, is not only for kids. Adults can also enjoy it. The Expolab Team (Irene Lapuente and Ramon Sangüesa) have been there too and enjoyed playing with wheel gears, peg tops and prisms. We think that this kind of initiatives help not just to bring science close to people but also let the younger ones appropriate by science themselves. Congratuilations to the Tech!
