On the Road - Perlis MOSTI Roadshow

I was up north in Perlis last week for another exhilarating round of the Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation's nationwide roadshow - It was a good affair it seems with busloads of schoolkids ready to fertilize their minds with the endless possibilities that science can offer to them...

Second angkasawan Mejar. Dr. Faaez was there. Nice chap. I must say the popular public opinio that I gathered on the fair grounds was that he's the better liked amicable person. But that's a matter of opinion of course.

Now the reason why I'm writing this: remember the last blog entry about the National Science Centre? Well they did a good show in Perlis. A lot of people, schoolkids and teachers included made a beeline to their area...They took along some of their permanent exhibits and made up some new ones as well.

And guess what? Some of the exhibits which I wrote earlier, i.e. not working etc. , were in fact working fine at Dewan 2020 in Perlis! They apparently fixed them for this show! Well I hope they'll fix the others back in KL as well...

Pusat Sains Negara Visit

Pusat Sains Negara Visit, originally uploaded by zeeman01.

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*