This is for everyone who took your picture at December’s Adults Only Night: I’m preparing them for an activity we’ll do this Thursday night, and you guys are totally cute, and your pictures are putting me in a great mood. Thanks!

–Katherine

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Getting ready for Adult Night # 2: REMIX, with some pretty sweet record hacking.

I’ve been dying to try this Analog Vinyl Sampling project I read about a few months ago. What better reason for record hacking than REMIX night?

Here are some photos from the first test.

We are getting the rest of the records water jet cut tomorrow, at a sweet vendor Claudia found in South Calgary.  I can’t believe anyone agreed to help cut this stuff.

We’re not totally sure that this project is going to work, so don’t get your hopes up too much. But it is going to be really neat if it does!

-dana

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To our latest question-sender:

Thanks! We’re glad this blog can help. If you have any additional questions, or if something in particular piques your interest, let us know. If you’re ever in Calgary, we hope you can come for a visit.

–the exhibits team

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I’ve been checking my inbox every five minutes this morning, because I am expecting to receive two of the coolest emails ever.  Let’s rewind a bit first.  Back in November I met with two groups of high school students from Forest Lawn High School and Bishop Carroll High School.  These students have joined the High School Science Café Program at TELUS Spark, where they came in for a training and leadership session for how to run their own Science Café back at their own high schools.  

If you have never been to a Science Café and you live in Calgary, you should check them out at the Ironwood Stage and Grill every last Thursday of the month (next one is Thursday, January 24^th with Jay Ingram and Dr. Valerie Sim discussing Science vs. the Media).  This provides an opportunity to hang out at a pub, enjoy a brew or some dinner, while listening to a panel discussion, followed by an open floor for questions and answers; and let me tell you – the Science Café goers sure know how to ask the BEST questions.

Obviously the youth science cafes can’t take place in pubs, but there are several ways to create an informal environment; science cafés are anything but boring, and nothing like a lecture (So each team is asked to find a non-classroom space in their school as a venue).  During the training session, students participated in their own science café hosted at TELUS Spark, titled “What Questions Do You Ask When Building A New Science Centre?” where they met Julie Bowen, VP of Content and Katherine Ziff, Exhibit Developer to discuss this question and feel out how a science café runs.  The teams explored the galleries and then together they brainstormed a list of questions they felt could make compelling science cafes.  The questions they came up with blew me away, and would all make outstanding Science Café topics:

- Can your eyes pop out if you sneeze with your eyes open?
- What caused the dancing plague of 1518?
- Why is chocolate so addicting?
- Why so breakups suck so much?
- Could you donate your brain?
- Will Star Trek ever be real?
- Overpopulation:  is there enough room for all of us?
- Why do we have toe hair?  (Edit: YES, REALLY, WHY DO HUMANS HAVE TOE HAIR!?)
- What is the speed of STD Transmission?
- Why is processed cheese processed?
- How does glue stick?
- If an airplane is on a treadmill, can it take off? 

So, I am waiting for the email that contains their final questions.  Although the students brainstormed together during the training session, they were encouraged to repeat this process at their schools, and to narrow down their ideas by crowdsourcing their student body to figure out which topics their peers would be most excited to hear about at their science café.   Today is their deadline to tell us their top 3 choices for science café topics.  From there, TELUS Spark has committed to matching these students with a panel of two speakers from either industry or academia who could best address at least one of their three questions to their student body (and we want to match them up with GREAT speakers: knowledgeable, engaging, and maybe even funny folks).  I’m really excited to hear what questions students will want to address – and more so, I’m excited for them to host events that they completely developed on their own. 

Yesterday, I received this note from the Forest Lawn group’s teacher liaison; here is an excerpt. 

“We are meeting tomorrow to go over the results of the student survey and should have some questions by tomorrow. My students were drawn to the topic of relationships so my guess is that our questions will relate to different aspects of love.”

Oh man.  These students are going to be creating something really special.   

If the High School Science Café program sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, please get in touch at and we can discuss how you can join this initiative (Claudia.Bustos@sparkscience.ca).  This a free outreach program, and were students commit to hosting one or two science cafés in their high schools, and TELUS Spark provides them with the training (and a free visit to TELUS Spark with funds from NSERC Canada), tools and funding to produce their own speaker series.  And if you are not in high school anymore, and over 18, please join us at the Ironwood Stage and Grill on January 24^th 2011.   

-Claudia

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This weekend I was helping people make Toy Mash-ups at Market Collective when a girl named Georgia* came in. She was pretty stoked about the activity and as picked her toy parts she asked what we had to put them together.

I slid the big hot glue gun away from her as I gave her a low temp glue gun and explained how to use it.  She cut me off and said, “I already know how to use a hot glue gun. I learned at the science centre.”

Amazing! We almost never get to hear this part of the story–how confident and skilled people feel *after* a visit. With bells going off in my head I told her, that may be the very glue gun you learned with at the science centre. We’re from the science centre. She then took a closer look at the table and pointed out where we’d collected each material from Open Studio at the science centre. The wires and capacitors from “the place where you take apart electronics.” The buttons and sequins “from the place where you make stuff with glue.”

She didn’t use our fancy exhibit names, but she was carrying around a model of Open Studio in her mind–and a vision of herself as someone who definitely doesn’t need to be told how to use a hot glue gun.

*Yo Georgia, sorry if you read this and are embarrassed. But you are quite rad. Will you please think about volunteering with us when you are old enough?
-dana

Thanks to Ziff for help with this (and many) blog posts.

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I spent a long time trying to picture Being Human. For months on end I’d stare at colour palettes, drawings and floor plans, then close my eyes and strain to envision the exhibit. If I just had a good enough spatial sense, I thought, I’d know what the finished exhibit will be like.

Wrong. Even if I’d summoned up a perfect image of the hall it would have missed how it sounds. Because it turns out that Being Human has a distinctive sound, and that sound is laughter. I can stand in the hall with my eyes closed and pick out the giggles of the Flirt Station, the belly laughs of Eight Faces, and the hoots of delight from people watching themselves jump in slow motion. You can’t know what a finished exhibit will be like unless you include the visitors.

–Katherine

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A while back I wrote about how not to be an expert. Today I read the best explanation I’ve seen in a long time on why not to be an expert in, of all places, the journal Nature. But you don’t have to take my word for it–read it yourself.

–Katherine

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We recently got the question, “who gets these questions from the Prototype Lab Blog?”. The answer is that the exhibit developers do! So thanks for the question–and please ask away if you have more.

–Katherine

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So, last week we kicked off our “TOP 10″ training week, where we are passing over the programs we’ve developed to the new staff. TOP 10 includes program offerings that we anticipate will book the most, and that relate directly to an exhibit on the floor.

As the trainer, I got really excited about our development process. Though we have really improved our documentation process, many questions cam up from our new insightful staff. Instead of coming up with my best guess for an answer, I was able to draw on first hand experiences to answer their inquiries. Since I have run iterations of the programs multiple times, I felt confident answering their tough questions such as, “Do the kids ever steal each others’ materials? What happens if they don’t finish the activity? What do you do with the parents during this part?”

Awesome.
Here is some of our new staff being grade 8 kids, and learning our new Hydraulic Challenges program.

-Carly

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One of the awesome things about Protospace, Calgary’s Hackerspace is that everyone there is a geek about something (some people are geeks about a lot of things.) Last night we had a BBQ at our new space. I was idly talking about maybe one days thinking about making some LED signs and Travis told me and Ben about this amazing resource that calculates how many resistors you’d need to wire up a given number of LEDs for a given power source. You fill out 4 pieces of information and it even gives you a circuit diagram! Pretty sure I’m going to start this project tonight.

http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz

I love the universe.

-dana

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