Our family is proud to boast membership at Sci-Quest, Huntsville's most premiere science education center for children.
By "premiere" I mean the center is located in a large unused warehouse-like building at a satellite campus of the local community college, but this tin man has a heart. My children enjoy monthly homeschool science programs there as part of our homeschooling routine, summer camp sessions, and mostly functional exhibits.
Functional is key.
Our membership also grants us access to many other network science centers throughout the country. So far, we have taken advantage of this perk to visit two other centers that are essentially on opposite ends of the science center spectrum; the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama, and the Emerald Coast Science Center in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
McWane is the arguably the local granddaddy of science centers. Boasting four floors of exhibits ranging from aquarium-quality marine life exhibits to high-end robotics, this center has a lot to young kids to observe and experience. Anyone who frequents children's museums will quickly pick up on recurring themes, as exhibits repeat from one venue to the next, but McWane pretty much has it all.
On the other end of the spectrum, Emerald Coast Science Center is one of the sorriest excuses for a science center I've ever seen. The living organism exhibits consisted of what look liked my neighbor's pet turtle and a couple sad-looking fish, and many other exhibits were dirty, broken, or stuffed with trash.
Both McWane and Emerald Coast had many broken exhibits - both exceeding by far the number of broken exhibits at Sci-Quest. Emerald Coast was the worst perpetrator, though perhaps it could be forgiven due to being obviously underfunded, but McWane, while clean and well-kept, also included a number of broken exhibits. Sometimes, these fixes seem like they would be exceedingly simple. (An aside, our family once saw an exhibit at the Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that illustrated "how much is a million". One of the larger numbers was missing a zero, basically making the entire exhibit erroneous due to a simple typesetting error!)
Sci-Quest has remained relatively liberated from this problem, which I can only attribute to the large amount of community support it receives. Each exhibit is sponsored by a corporation, family, or individual that commits to its maintenance and repair. I'm sure this is largely made possible by the disproportionate number of engineers in our city (1 out of every 13 adults), but here is an example of how much of a difference community support can make.
We have not done it yet, but it is our resolution to adopt an exhibit ourselves, and when we do so, I will be posting about it in this blog. In addition to supporting the center, what a fabulous project for homeschooled children!
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