Educational Fun - Dynamic Earth Exhibition (Our Dynamic Earth (Edinburgh))

Member Name: stmatth

Product:	Our Dynamic Earth (Edinburgh)
Date:	05/09/00 (148 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, mostly on a good scientific basis

Disadvantages: Could give more background information

Ever wanted to take a time machine back to the Big Bang, or ride on a tectonic plate down into the centre of the Earth? Then you will have fun in the Dynamic Earth Exhibition in Edinburgh. Are you more interested in educational experience? Then you will also enjoy it.

This exhibition is a strange - and mostly but not completely successful - mixture of impressive multimedia fun and good education. In the first half, you are - in groups of visitors - taken on an imaginary journey back in time. First you enter the time machine - a glass elevator which brings you down to the Big Bang, while you see historical events passing outside. The Big Bang you will see from the windows of a "futuristic starship": Elementary particles, atoms and stars forming. In the next room, you are suddenly inside the Earth - allegedly standing on a tectonic plate which is subducted under a continent, the ground shaking, and hot magma and little vulcanoes around you. After the heat of Earth's interior you then experience the cold of an Ice Age.

After this first, heavily multimedia-centred part follows a quieter but still entertaining second part, which you can explore at your own pace. First you will go through a corridor called the "Timeline", following the history of life on Earth from single cell organisms to our present animals. All along this corridor are models of characteristic animals and plants which lived in each of the epochs, all in original size - which means that you only get a dinosaur foot, not the whole animal.... Narrower gates in the "timeline" symbolize the major extinction events, no more dinosaurs after the last one!

At the end of the "timeline" you are back in the modern world and now go through different regions and habitats: the oceans, the polar regions, and at the end you are in a tropical rain forest with real trees and real rain (as if it didn't rain enough in Edinburgh already!).

>Now, the first part clearly should not be taken too serious. Neither the idea of watching the Big Bang from a spaceship nor sitting an a tectonic plate deep inside the Earth has much realism to it. Even if it was possible, nothing much would be visible: You would not really see elementary particles whizzing around at the Big Bang! So I would view this part mainly as a very impressive and hugely entertaining piece of multimedia art, only loosely based on science. Obviously it wasn't meant as an educational part anyway, as the background information is really kept to the absolute minimum.

The second part, however, is designed to be a serious - but entertaining - educational experience. The models in the "timeline"-corridor are exact images of nature, you can touch them and get them to know in a very "hands-on"-way. The same is true for the other regions, and my personal favourite was the very realistic, life size rain forest, where there is so much to discover. Furthermore, as far as I could see, all displays were generally scientifically sound (although I did notice one avoidable blunder) - something that cannot be said of some other allegedly educational multimedia-shows that I have seen.

However, while I enjoyed it very much now, I believe that I would have given my parents a hard time had I visited this exhibition at the age of say 8 or 10. Why? The exhibition does not give you much background information, it is all "see, feel and enjoy", and as a child I would have asked hundreds of questions that my parents could not have answered, and they would not have found the answers in the exhibition either. Well, now, after years of University work in Earth Sciences, I can make sense of everything that was on display, but I believe that most visitors are probably not in this fortunate situation. I feel that the curiosity of children is underestimated. For example, as children, my friends and I had a lot of fun memorizi
ng all these funny dinosaur names and the names for geological epochs - but in the "timeline" corridor, the epochs are not even mentioned!

To be fair, they employ a lot of people who are there to answer questions, and the staff I met seemed well trained and friendly, so this is probably much better than having written information everywhere. However, I wonder if it is still easy to ask somebody on a busy Saturday afternoon with thousands of visitors around...

Another slightly negative aspect is the lack of interactivity: while you can touch a lot, there is not realy much you can *do* with the displays. True, there are the occasional computers on which you can play a little educational game, but they they gave the impression of being added afterwards to add a bit of interactivity to an otherwise completely static exhibition.

And, of course, there may be a fundamental problem with this kind of exhibitions: They do give the impression that doing science is always fun and easy. Well, in reality it is not, but it is mostly hard work, although the results are very rewarding (intellectually, not financially....). One cannot and should not expect to learn much without reasonable effort and serious thinking. However, it would not be entirely fair to criticise an exhibition for this - exhibitions have to be designed to attract people. Still, I think that every science exhibition should also make some attempts to help visitors appreciate the importance of serious efforts when you try to understand the world.

Would I recommend it to a friend? That depends on the friend. If she is the type who finds the whole idea of diving on a tectonic plate into Earth's interior completely and utterly ridiculous and thinks this invalidates the rest of the exhibition, then I would not recommend it to her.

If she can accept the fun part, and otherwise enjoys exploring the world and trying to make sense of it, then I can recommend it.
I would, however, also recommend that she takes somebody along who has a bit of background in Earth Science, who can direct the attention to some of the fascinating things that she might not notice on her own.

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Dynamic Earth Exhibition
107 Holyrood Road
Edinburgh EH8 8AX
http://www.dynamicearth.co.uk

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