I have worked in the field of stimulating people’s interest in science and technology in Estonia already for 10 years. I started in Tartu working in AHHAA science centre as a student and as my life moved to the capital of Estonia, I had a great opportunity to follow the path in Energy Discovery Centre,a host of 2018 NSCF annual Conference, in the heart of Tallinn.
I just love the idea that the things you do, actually could change a life of somebody and get new people inspired. My passion is to work with the new exhibits and exhibitions.
With NSCF scholarship I had an opportunity to visit renewed Experimentarium to get some new ideas and fresh look because right now we have a plan to also rebuild and refresh some parts of our permanent exhibition area in our science centre in Tallinn. According to this I was especially interested in user friendliness, design and durability of the exhibitions as well as recreation and resting areas in exhibition.
At Experimentarium I met director Hanne Haack Larsen, she had made my plan for the visit and also gave me warm welcome and short presentation of Experimentarium. After that I had a wonderful opportunity to meet Clara who shared the knowledge about how they educate the explainers and how does their every-day planning look like. The coordination was great! Experimentarium has about 70 explainers working part-time. That is a totally different system to run compared to Energy Discovery Centre that works with 5 explainers right now but we are ready when the number of staff will grow!
After that I had an opportunity to follow explainers at the exhibition who shared their experiences and also to see the communication with visitors in presenting the digestive system.
A also had a great lunch with project manager Bent who was telling me about some of development projects.
I felt that Experimentarium had made a great work with the new building and exhibitions. I loved the idea of having recognisable zones of activities and exhibitions. It made the visiting experience much more easy and systemized. I was happy to find user friendly exhibits that where durable and lot of nice resting areas between the exhibits and exhibitions.
I was fascinated by the opportunities of the brand new building and very happy to see how dedicated and professional was the stuff of Experimentarium. I enjoyed my visit as much as the families and school groups in the exhibitions.
I feel that visiting different science centres round the world not only keeps me fascinated and motivated but also offer a good change to find out different solutions to the similar challenges that science centres face in science communication. I just love the idea of sharing the knowledge in NSCF because it does not matter how big or small you are as a science centre, you can learn great things from each other.