I visited two weekends ago the Pusat Sains Negara - after not coming over for about 2 years or so.
What can I say? Just coming in, I was able to impress the kids of what cool and great things they could see and learn. It was a promising start with the fish, aquarium, the animatronic animals (the sea turtles were a favourite).
There was one exhibit which was a hit with my son- the one which demonstrated centripetal force via a perpetual motion-like machine. It involved cranking up balls up the different segments of the exhibit, which then fall into rails to demonstrate what perpetual motion can do...Some segments required another ball to be cranked up to set in motion stuff like King Kong climbing up a skyscraper and to trigger a boot to kick the other ball. When we got the third part of it, the ball skipped the rain and fell into the centre of the display with a thud! That's off bounds so we couldn't do anything about it. Seems like the machine hasn't been fine tuned for awhile...
In the end however, I couldn't help feeling a bit peeved and cheated since a lot of the exhibits were not working well and some were even broken...It was a weekend and I guess some of the science shows were not on.
Felt a bit hungry and peckish and the only place to eat was the souvenir shop which had a makeshift kind of eatery with toasted bread, instant noodles and sandwiches. Wished there was more so I can encourage the family to come more often though...
How are we supposed to cultivate science in the young then? We sent a man to space but we can't even maintain some permanent science exhibits, even when people pay to get in...*sigh*
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