MangoVine - The Interactive Hong Kong Science Museum

15 April, 2009
Wednesday

Like the Science Museum in London and maybe others around the world, the Hong Kong Science Museum is full of interactive exhibits (80% of 'em!) that bring science to life, particularly for young kids.

The Hong Kong Science Museum is located in Tsim Sha Tsui East in the Kowloon Peninsula of Hong Kong. We went today - a Wednesday - because Hong Kong museums are free then, and so it looked like all the local schools did the same.

There are several floors of exhibits split into different areas where the most popular items for children are a computer area, a real (but stationary) car in which visitors can attempt to drive in a driving simulation (avoiding accidents, speeding, and excessive fuel usage), and a small life-sized stationary aircraft with a video of a flight around Hong Kong playing inside the cockpit.

About five hundred exhibits are displayed in the permanent exhibition area where the most prominent exhibit is a twenty two metre high twin-tower Energy Machine which is the largest of its kind in the world.

A total of eighteen galleries cover a wide range of science and technology topics including light, sound, motion, electricity and magnetism, mathematics, life science, geography, meteorology, computer, transportation, communication, food science, energy/energy conservation and home technology.

We spent the most time in the basement, since there is a classic hall of mirrors section and a larger area that is interspersed with interactive exhibits linked together as a "fitness test". We begun this test, which involved just under twenty separate exhibits, but after completing only three of them, realised the exercise was going to take forever, what with waiting turns for some of them. The ones we did, including trying to balance on a board and hanging onto a bar in a pull-up position for as long as possible, had worn us out anyway!

The basement also housed a special exhibition called the Exploration of Time, which allows visitors to explore their perceptions of time and Einstein's Theory of Relativity. There's a video machine in there which records what it sees and then plays back all the frames in a different order. This is an old effect which I messed around with when first experimenting with multimedia over a decade ago, but it's still entertaining. Linh and I each stand in front of the machine in turn and then using our Flip video camera, record from the little black and white monitor.

Regards prices, as mentioned above, museums in Hong Kong are free on a Wednesday, but otherwise a standard ticket to the Hong Kong Science Museum is HK$25, which isn't alot anyway.

More Hong Kong Science Museum photos on Flickr

The Hong Kong Science Museum website

Wikipedia source

This entry posted in : Attractions. Hong Kong. Tourism.

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The Interactive Hong Kong Science Museum

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