Children love the interactive nature of the exhibition. Photograph: The Science of Survival
A little while ago I wrote about my quest for ways to talk about climate change with my six-year-old son. The following day Sara from the Science Museum in London got in touch to tell me that they were doing an exhibition focused on that very subject: did I want to bring my children along? It was the day before the teachers' strike, I was about to have three energetic boys on my hands ... Readers, I leapt at the chance.
Is this the way to teach your children about climate change? Hmm. Both yes and no. The exhibition is called The Science of Survival. It's housed in some blacked out galleries in the museum, and consists of several very hi-tech installations and games which children can play in order to learn about what the future holds.
It's aimed at eight-year-olds and upwards, but my brood, who are six, four and two, had a fantastic time all the same: lots of flashing lights, bright colours, cartoon characters and things to do. The activities include a food game, where six children around a table compete for rice/pizza/fish/broccoli (my poor middle boy was too young to work out how to grab the food before anyone else, and he got very depressed as his plate remained empty), a water collecting section, a seed growing project, a car building factory, a driving game and a build-your-own-house section.
There was a particularly lovely section which somehow projected fish onto the floor who swam away as you chased them - my two-year-old spent most of his time there crawling after the cyberfish and giggling hysterically. Your results in all the games get recorded on a card you're given when you first enter, and at the end it's all downloaded and the environment that you've designed comes up on a giant screen.
It's all fantastically innovative and attention grabbing, and very interactive. I remember how much I loved museums with "buttons to push" as a kid, and this puts all those to shame. And it was a big success with the boys: they had to be prised away from the car building game where you choose how many passengers your vehicle can carry, what it's made of, what fuel it uses and what colour you want it sprayed. And they had to be dragged out feet first (literally in the case of one child - you know who you are) of the whole thing because after about an hour and a half I was frankly getting bored.
But did they learn about climate change? Obviously it was aimed at slightly older children, but when I asked my oldest son afterwards what the exhibition was about, he said "how it will be when people are poor". I asked if he'd realised it was about pollution and all the things we'd been talking about, and he said yes, and then screwed up his face and admitted he'd had no idea. He loved it though, and wants to go back tomorrow.
(Interestingly I asked my middle son what his favourite bit had been. Turned out he liked the train journey up to London most of all.)
