The first participatory or inter-active science centre
in Australia was Questacon, which operated in Canberra for
the eight years, 1980-1988. Its very success lead to its
demise: it became the inspiration for the National Science and Technology Centre which opened in late 1988. Questacon,
in common with many of the World's new breed of science
centres and museums, was modelled on San Francisco's famous
Exploratorium. These new institutions have copied ideas and
even actual exhibits from the Exploratorium, but most of
them have failed to copy the Exploratorium's use of
Explainers, a feature which Exploratorium staff think is
integral to the whole concept. Questacon is one of the
institutions in which an explainer system was established,
although it differed in some significant respects from that
at the Exploratorium.
Participatory science centres have been seen as part of
the answer to the problem of increasing public awareness and
understanding of science. There is a growing body of
literature which is concerned with the learning of science
in informal educational settings, such as in these centres,
but there has been very little work done on the role of
museum docents or their equivalents in this learning. One
study of the Exploratorium's Explainers concentrated on the
value of their work as explainers for the people involved in
the system, in terms of their own personal development.
The aim of the present study was to compare the two
explainer systems and to investigate the work of Questacon
Explainers both in terms of their own personal development
and in their interaction with visitors to the centre.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219424 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Wanless, Jennifer H. F., n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Jennifer H. F. Wanless |
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