If you would like to visit a free, educational, interactive and fun expo, one that makes you feel that Central Otago is warm by comparison, then head along to the Far from Frozen – Going to Extremes showcase at Cromwell Sports Club, Barry Avenue, from 10am to 3pm on Saturday 12 June.
To ensure that Cromwell people get a chance to visit this event, Connect Cromwell have been working with Otago Museum.
“This amazing interactive science showcase will be great fun for young, old and in-between,” says Connect Cromwell Community Facilitator, Tania Partridge, adding, “Come get your hands dirty in an augmented reality sandpit and lots more. See you there!”
Far from Frozen is a hands-on showcase, developed by Otago Museum with help from partners across New Zealand – including the University of Otago, NIWA, Antarctica New Zealand, and the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology – and with support from the Ministry for Business, Employment and Innovation’s (MBIE) Unlocking Curious Minds fund.
The aim of the showcase is to acknowledge people’s fascination with Antarctica to open up discussion about climate change here in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally.
The programme was originally developed in 2016/17, and toured nationally in 2017-18, attracting and engaging over 35,000 people, with excellent feedback about how it led people through what is an otherwise complicated area of science.
In 2019/20, it travelled to Nieu, Fiji, Tonga and Raratonga – nations that face some of the most imminent impacts of climate change but have little access to professional science communication about the topic.
Locals will be able to enter Lab-in-a-Box, a 20ft container, developed into a science outreach programme with Prof. Peter Dearden at the University of Otago.
Visitors will be able to don VR headsets and clothing from Antarctica New Zealand to get a sense of the challenges that researchers face when going to the ice to study climate change.
An augmented reality sandbox will enable us to create our own landscapes and then create our own extreme weather events.
Displays and interactive activities will help illustrate what we can do about the challenge of climate change and to appreciate how researchers are trying to tackle the problem with new GreenTech developments.
