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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I had a very inspiring day today at the new Canada Sports Hall of Fame.

CANADIAN SPORTS HALL OF FAME

Totally worth checking out. But, if you are looking for inspiration right now, I recently shared this with my mom, who intern shared it with her grade 6 class. They liked it, and maybe you will too.

MOVE

Carly

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My iPhone recently alerted me that I have filled it’s photo taking capacity to the brim, which means I had to upload a bunch of photos to my computer.  This is awesome, because I have tons of photos from the “recent past” to share.  Going through the photo stream brought to focus how much has happened in the past few months!  We’ve been all over the place getting ready for opening day.  I will review the phone highlights now, and go into depth with some of these events later this week. 

The team has kept busy on the weekends down at Market Collective.  For our April event we invited market goers to build a cardboard forest and for the May event we asked people about their favourite places in Calgary and within Alberta.

If you helped us with this project, you're awesome! Also click to see larger image.

If you click to enlarge this image, you can see that someone annotated one of their favourite places in Alberta to be the home of a cool cat. I support cool cat spotting!

Later in May we were exhibitors’ at Calgary’s International Children’s Festival!   You can read up on what we were up to here. 

In spite of the rain, Children's Fest is the best! Great theatre festival for all ages! My favourite show this year was Circus Incognitus. So wonderful and whimsical!

We continued with in-house fabrication of programming materials including electricity blocks, shadow puppet screens, and marble machines. 

Jeff and I sanding down blocks to be used for an electricity program. And Mr. Bill working hard on project construction. Any opportunity to work in the shop makes me the happiest person ever.

 A team of us has emptied out our programming supplies from all over the building and our external warehouse, all into one centralized area in the former WowTown.  These before and after shots should give you an idea of all the materials we currently have in house. 

WowTown is the former 'Iceberg Room' turning Titanic. It is huge. It is now filled with every programming material we've ever owned. We're working on getting it organized. It's like a more pleasant episode of Hoarders.

This is essentially the accumulation of 44 years of materials all in one room. We've tossed and recycled a lot of thngs we will never use, but we are still getting ready for our move. More on this later!

We found some weird things while cleaning up. Like several relic floppy disks and a sassy 'Grandma' calendar...

Offsite visits in July!  Katherine, myself and Lia Rogers from Dorkbot Calgary went to check out the Open Studio Day for the R.I.P. Workshop in Banff. 

We’ve had several meetings an entire Content Team to discuss and map out our deliverables and align our priorities for opening day.  All employee training has kicked off  as well.   We meet every Tuesday and Thursday so that upon completion, every member of staff from finance, house keeping, programs etc., will have the skills that they need to be a facilitator at the New Science Centre!  Training has been a blast!   

Photos of organizational meetings, which are essential at this point. And the middle right hand photo is from a training session where we re-created the colour of a memorable sky in our lives.

Also  – super exciting news –  last week the exhibits for Open Studio have arrived to two weeks ago to the New Science Centre Site!  Installation has commenced! 

These are not my iPhone photos. But I still felt the need to share them!

We’re going to get even busier now, so we try to squeeze fun in whenever we can!  Even if it’s jumping rope in the hallway.  

Dana jumping rope!

Stay tuned.  A lot of updates (both current and retrospective) to come! 

-Claudia

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