Learning journey on friday to science centre.

We ALMOST went to the zoo. Frankly speaking I would have preferred science centre. Zoo is stinky and you don't learn much. Okay you do learn about how people are destroying the earth yadayada... but by being a miser you are pretty much the ultimate conservationist, if you don't take externalities into account, that is. And if you have had a proper science education, your conscience would take the externalities into account pretty well when you make decisions. So yeh. Zoo = useless for us.

Then we got to the science centre we all felt pretty out of place. The science centre was full of primary school kids running about and we were like the only jc students there(in school uniform some more!). But we didn't regret for too long. It was indeed quite a nice and fun learning experience. Even though we probably didn't learn a lot, but still better than zoo in that 1) you learn more 2) got air con 3) you can play with all the exhibits.

The exhibit I liked the most (and our class spent the most time in) was the exhibit on Corroilis force. Essentially it is just a turntable, but they provide steel and plastic rings and discs for you to slide or roll across the turntable. BUT I found out that if you roll the disc across a chord of the turn table at the right speed, the disc would orbit around the centre of the turntable, and eventually it would collapse nicely at the centre! Sometimes, it would form an elliptical orbit with an epicentre that orbit around the centre, which just looks darn cool. We spent about 30 hour there, which is pretty long compared to all the other exhibits.

Later we left when we thought there wan't much time left, but our teacher i/c said that we could stay another 30 mins more, to our delight. So we took him to the turntable and he played with us for the next 30 mins. Then some kids came so we let them play. But they couldn't really appreciate the exhibit, as they just slid the discs across. But nvm we were nice people, so we showed them how to do it, but their attention span wasn't long enough. Oh well. It is still pretty amazing after playing that for an hour.

OH and once we had a big metal ring and and small metal ring orbiting round in an elliptical orbit and they croosed paths and the small one went through the big one that they continued orbiting! All the people watching (about 9 or 10 ppl) were like "WOAH!". Seriously, it was spectacular. After that we tried to repeat it to the teacher, but we only managed to get the small one to crash in the middle of the big one sideways such that the small one collapses in the big one. Not bad anyway. Impt thing is I got to see it :-P

The one thing I felt was that some of the spectacular stuff is somewhat cheem, so primary school kids generally don't really understand it, and once they grow up they wouldn't go science centre anymore. So does the science centre really contribute to science education? I think the answer is a definite yes, because all the cool exhibits would makes science interesting (not like physics lectures). Even though they might not understand how the cool stuff actually works, they would continue to read up, and the interest would take them through.

OMG I just accidentally wrote something that can be used for learning journey reflections. I'm amazed.