“He he he,” he cackles with the sarcastic laugh of Dr Evil. His mother, a fashionably dressed Chinese, is happy her offspring is having a good time; there’s a crowd, waiting to see what will happen. In front of the boy is a robot – a human-size machine, as if it stepped straight out of an Isaac Asimov novel.
The robot waits patiently until the boy puts the messed-up Rubik’s cube into its outstretched hand. “Nihau,” says the bot, greeting the boy. Then it gets to work, hands moving swiftly.
In under a minute, the cube is perfect, all colours aligned. The boy sighs in disappointment, and his mother drags him to the next exhibit. A girl steps up, and the robot-cube adventure starts all over again.
I am in Shanghai’s Science and Technology Museum – a huge four-storey building, filled with machinery and experiments. Here you’ll find replicas of astronauts’ training equipment, the Shenzhou V spacecraft that took the first Chinese taikonaut, Yang Liwei, into space, simulators of earthquakes and volcanoes, virtual-reality experiences, computer memory modules illustrating Moore’s Law, and much, much more.
With my nine-year-old son, I’ve been to science museums in several countries, but this one truly stands out. And the main reason is that it’s not just for kids.
On my way there, I asked a woman in her thirties for directions. “Oh, I’m going there too,” she said cheerfully. “Follow me!” She lives in the suburbs of Shanghai and loves science – so wants to spend part of her day in the museum. It may be a Friday during a working week, but the museum is packed – with visitors ranging from single adults to couples, families, and class after class of school kids of various ages, all sporting red communist scarves and coloured uniforms.
It’s obvious: in China science and technology are held in the highest regard, and scientists and engineers are more respected than many other professionals.
Inside the museum, visitors get a map that tells them which parts are best for children and what’s more interesting for adults. The museum is divided into 13 main sections, including World of Robots, Space Navigation, Humans and Health, and Information Era. Each offers a degree of interactivity for adults and children alike that I’ve never seen anywhere else.
“In a rotating spacecraft, even just reaching to touch a switch, your fingers will probably touch a wrong button. This is the Coriolis Effect. Scientists have designed a unique piece of equipment, the Coriolis Big Wheel, to train astronauts and let them gradually adapt to life in a rotating space capsule,” reads a plaque next to a lorry-size machine. As you get in, there are squirt guns there, for you to aim at a target. The machine turns rapidly – and, if you want to feel what it’s like to be in orbit, aim at the target and try to hit it. It’s not easy!
On another floor, you’re introduced to cars that are energy-saving or fuelled by hydrogen. Then there is the world of physical sciences, explaining everything from radioactivity to the theory of general relativity.
In another section, you learn about high-quality and low-quality coal. You go into a simulator mine, where – squirt guns at the ready again – you ‘shoot’ high-quality coal, with the aim of learning the difference between the two. And in AV Paradise you can get into a plane’s cockpit simulator.
The museum has plenty of souvenir shops, where you can buy anything from robots and ‘lightning’ lamps where an electric charge follows your finger, to real scorpions and other creepy crawlies encased in glass bricks. I know my nine-year-old would have loved to get one of those but, as much as I cherish my memories of Shanghai’s Science and Technology Museum, having a real, albeit dead, scorpion at home is not my cup of tea. I got him the lightning lamp instead.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.