IT IS probably the Rolls-Royce of science museums in the Philippines, and the fact that it attracts a mass of crowding schoolchildren each day should serve as an assurance that education in science and technology is benefiting many of our young, albeit in an alternative way outside the classroom. Located right in the midst of the SM Mall of Asia is taipan Henry Sy’s brainchild, the Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center.

Corporate museums in the Philippines are slowly growing by the handful, but the taipan chose a different genre of museum especially characterized by its hands-on interactive way of educating the museum audience. Managing the museum is Family Entertainment Center Inc., a subsidiary of the SM Group of Companies.

It would be an understatement to say that the place is filled with education. The basic scientific operations that any school child knows are all there. But it is much more than that. Many of the center’s features are both current and futuristic. A section on global warming actually teaches one to find ways to help mitigate the melting of polar ice.

Among its very interactive presentations is a virtual coral reef where a “fish friend,” Mr. T, actually answers questions on how we can take part in saving our seas. The museum viewer gets inspired by the motivational interaction. There is the Bug Rug where viewers walk through a virtual Madagascar forest floor and apply real techniques done by entomologists to know more about different critters.

There is the usual robotics section, but it goes beyond presentation by allowing children a hands-on learning process about building and programming robots. A section on “City Science” features miniature replicas of the tallest buildings in the world. Here, an exhibit shows how the largest cities of the world can be affected by tremors from an earthquake simulator. The “Smart Media City” has the latest software in information technology and computer graphics with hands-on computer terminals and LCD screens that allow for interactive learning on 3-D virtual worlds.

The crowning glory of the museum is the huge orb that one does not miss in the center of it all. It is called the “Digistar Planetarium” and is considered one of the best in Southeast Asia. Inside, it is actually a theater of the “stars” (the real variety) with a seamless domed screen that is awesomely enormous, literally bringing the viewer to the edge of one’s seat. Among several showings are the “Dawn of the Space Age,” “Stars of the Pharaohs,” “Cosmic Collisions” (simulations of cosmic impacts narrated by actor Robert Redford), “Passport to the Universe” (a virtual tour of intergalactic space narrated by actor Tom Hanks) and the “Seven Wonders of the World” and their present-day counterparts.

Ensuring both visual and aural pleasure is a digital surround sound system that enwraps the viewer’s perspective. The “Dawn of the Space Age” was a particularly moving presentation of man’s first landing on the moon in 1969. Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin come alive with the now-famous words “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It is as if one’s feet are literally on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility.

Science museums are actually a burgeoning trend in the country. That SM has joined the growing venture with an extremely high-tech investment is a good paradigm for corporate institutions to follow. Others have opined that where SM malls sprout, a conversely proportional decline in the values of young people takes place because of the crass materialism it lures them to. May SM Mall of Asia’s Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center be able to reverse that trend.

The trailblazer in hands-on science museums in the country is the Philippine Science Centrum, a victim of last year’s Typhoon “Ondoy” devastation in the city of Marikina. Building on the come-on that “science is fun,” that is exactly what it offers to the viewer, who may not necessarily be a child. The galleries feature interactions on electricity and magnetism, lights, water, earth science, vision and perception, mathematics, bioethics and biotechnology, mechanics and a host of other things.

Located at the Riverbanks Center, the centrum actually supports a network of science museums nationwide, apart from its popularly received traveling exhibits. It considers as its most active provincial counterpart the Oro Science and Technology Centrum of the Mindanao University of Science and Technology in Cagayan de Oro City. As expected, all of the exhibits are hands-on, a must for people of all ages and not just schoolchildren.

To be sure, there are varieties of science museums. For example, the realm of Natural Science has very well invaded the Mindanao museum world. The finest and most equipped example is the Natural Science Museum of the College of Science and Mathematics of Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology in Iligan City which opened in the late 1970s. There is a private initiative in Pagadian City by the visual artist Edison Abraham, the Metro Park Science Museum where replica fossils of prehistoric animals are exhibited. In a class of its own is the Mindanao Food Museum of UP Mindanao in Davao City.

Science museums are the new vehicles in the pursuit of science education. They come at a special time when we lament the decline of science knowledge among our school graduates. Science museums have become authorities of their own by creating a friendly environment for learning science in an alternative non-classroom atmosphere. Those with the wherewithal should take note not only of the pedagogical benefits of this venture but also of the capital profitability it can generate. Above all, it provides a healthy resource of weekend leisure for families.

* * *

Comments to [email protected]