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Tag: interactives

Top Secret

This month (September 2019) I finally had the opportunity to travel to London to see an exhibition I had been working on from January which opened in early July when I was on holiday. This is one of the odd things about working on a freelance basis; sometimes you work remotely but quite intensively on a project then don’t see the opening day or see visitors enjoying it until months later.

In early 2019, I was asked to join the project team at the Science Museum Group working on an exhibition called ‘Top Secret’. The exhibition is about the work of British Intelligence organisation GCHQ and I was asked to help out with the more family-friendly elements of the exhibition. The subject matter which ranges from Bletchley Park code-breaking to Soviet spy rings and modern cyber hacking is fascinating to adults of all ages, but we were aware we would need a layer of more child-friendly interpretation to appeal to the whole family. The three main elements of the family interpretation were a children’s trail with in-gallery labels, a ‘puzzle zone’ where interactive puzzles could explore the kind of skills that are required to be an analyst or code breaker and a postcard with clues to find and a secret image to reveal. 

Science Museum, London, Top Secret

Science Museum, London, Top Secret

One part of my role was to assist the team with the 2D and 3D puzzles and be the main point of contact for the fabricators of the 3D puzzles. I worked with the team on the prototyping to ensure they were pitched at the right level and fun to complete and on writing labels which made them easy to use and focused on the skills involved. One of the biggest challenges was creating puzzles that were fun for all ages but accessible for children of age 8 or even below in some cases.

We developed some simple cipher wheels to allow visitors to code and decode secret messages. Some puzzles test the ability to find hidden words and make words out of random letters. Some test the ability to find patterns in shapes or numbers, while others are all about logical thinking and perseverance or memory. Others are just about looking at the world slightly differently.

Science Museum, London, Top Secret
Science Museum, London, Top Secret
Science Museum, London, Top Secret

For the trail of family labels, we settled on a character called Alice (Alice in Wonderland perhaps? there’s a bit of a subtle Lewis Carroll reference in there) to lead family visitors around the exhibition. There are ten of these children’s labels that encourage closer investigation of some of the objects and stories in the exhibition.

As well as Alice’s trail there’s also a postcard which children and families can carry around the exhibition with more clues and questions which this time let you know which parts of the image to colour in to reveal a hidden picture.

Science Museum, London, Top Secret postcard
Science Museum, London, Top Secret postcard

The exhibition opened to the public in early July and runs in London until February 2020, appearing in Manchester later that year. It has been popular and well-received by visitors and now that I’ve had a chance to visit properly and look at all the objects and the work of my colleagues on the stories I wasn’t involved in, I can certainly see why. I highly recommend catching this if you can.

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Royal Observatory Edinburgh visitor centre

Summer in Scotland isn’t a great time for getting a good view of the night sky… with less than seven hours of darkness, and much of that twilight. In the summer of 2014, I worked with the Royal Observatory Edinburgh Visitor Centre in the slightly quieter time over the school summer holidays to  refurbish and rebuild some of their interactive exhibits.

I had worked with Tania Johnston, Senior Public Engagement Officer at the Observatory the previous year to create couple of new exhibits in their learning space. 

A model of the James Clark Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, home to the SCUBA camera developed and built at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. 

And the nose-cone from a Skylark Rocket. Skylark rockets flew from the 1950s up to 2005 and carried experiments into space, some of which were designed at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

Plinths and graphic panels built/printed by Leach Colour. 

Model of James Clerk Maxwell Model
Skylark Rocket nose cone
Prism interactive exhibit

This year, Tania was keen to revamp the interactive exhibits in the telescope dome. These exhibits had been in place for around 20 years (maybe longer!) and were the surviving three that remained popular with both staff and visitors from a slightly larger selection installed in the 1990s.

The challenge was to re-design and re-build them to keep all the aspects that had worked so well for so long, but to refresh the text and graphics and give them a more modern finish.

Relatively local company FifeX took care of the exhibit build while graphic design was by Chris Peters who designed the graphics for last years’ exhibits. The Observatory staff are very pleased with the outcome, hopefully the first school group to use them this week will agree.

  • Observatory interactives roe light wide

    Reflection and refraction

  • Observatory interactives roe spectros graphic

    Spectrum exhibit

  • Observatory interactives roe prism close

    Bending light

  • Observatory interactives roe prism wide

    Prism exhibit

  • Observatory interactives roe spectros glowing

    Nitrogen spectrum

  • Observatory interactives roe wide

    The telescope

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Energy Lab

I am very excited to announce that the Energy Lab at the National Mining Museum Scotland is almost ready to launch!

You can read about the origins of the project in this blog post. Since I wrote that in May, we have been very busy working with our designers and fabricators; Leach Colour to create the exhibits for the space.

Roger Meachem of Yet Science CIC has worked hard with the museum staff on a supporting teachers’ resource full of pre- and post-visit activities about energy and engineering challenges. And Ryan Sturrock of Walk the Line Productions has filmed presenter Emily Carr demonstrating some of these activities for the supporting dvd and YouTube clips.

National Mining Museum, Scotland Energy lab exterior

The Energy Lab

National Mining Museum, Scotland Energy lab

Introduction

We have collected objects, photographs and film footage donated kindly by Professor Stephen Salter, the University of Edinburgh, Jamie Taylor, Artemis Intelligent Power and Pelamis Wave Power.

And we have welcomed teachers and p6/7 pupils from three local schools to try out the activities, interactives and teachers’ pack.

National Mining Museum, Scotland

Generating Electricity and Energy Changes exhibits

National Mining Museum, Scotland wave energy

Wave Energy interactive

National Mining Museum, Scotland the duck

Salter’s Duck display

All that’s left to do is a little bit of final snagging before we welcome Fiona Hyslop, Scottish Government Minister for Culture and External Affairs to open the space formally on 1st October. Then we’ll get our teachers’ pack and film clips live on the museum website and compile our post-project evaluation report for our funders, the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Let’s hope that the Energy Lab can help inspire some of the children of the coal-mining areas of Midlothian to turn their creative problem-solving energy towards engineering a sustainable energy future for us all!

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