Let curiosity be your guide at Queen Victoria Museum’s latest exhibition, Alice’s Wonderland.
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Lewis Carroll’s much-loved tale Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the foundation of the exhibition, which explores science, maths and literacy concepts through play.
Queen Victoria Museum and Gallery director Richard Mulvaney said he hoped the exhibition would be a hit with children and adults throughout the summer school holidays.
“We want them to have fun, but we also want them to understand science. There are some really basic principles of science that run throughout life and I think this will really help,” Mr Mulvaney said.
“That’s the difference, I suppose, between a classroom where it’s tablets, textbooks and the like. Here you get to have fun and use your hands.”
The new exhibition will temporarily takeover the Phenomena Factory space on the museum’s ground floor, which Mr Mulvaney said was their most popular, hands-on exhibition.
The museum was in the process of designing, building and finding a series of new exhibits for the Phenomena Factory so the much-loved exhibition would be back and better than ever from about April next year, he said.
“As we lead into the Christmas period, we absolutely needed to do something that rekindled the interest in science by having fun,” Mr Mulvaney said.
Enter Alice’s Wonderland, which originated in San Jose in California before Museum’s Victoria’s Scienceworks developed new exhibits on the theme.
Exhibitions coordinator Alisanne Butler said it took about three days to set up the exhibition, which would launch on Saturday from 10am.
There were 23 different elements to the “out of a box” exhibition, including a rabbit burrow tunnel and a maze, Ms Butler said.
“It’s not a formal way of learning so they come in and they don’t realise that they’re learning, they think they’re just pushing buttons and pulling levers.”
Alice’s adventures inspired the different activities, including the Mad Hatter’s tea party where children learn about fractions and tea while playing with bubbles and plastic cakes, she said.
School holiday programs at the museum would also explore the new exhibition, which Ms Butler hoped would be a hit with families.
The exhibition paid homage to author Lewis Carroll, who was also a mathematician and logician.
However, not all of the Phenomena Factory exhibits would leave the space.
The jaffa machine would not be moved, Ms Butler said.
Mr Mulvaney hoped children and families alike would head down the rabbit hole and into the peculiar world of Wonderland at the Queen Victoria Museum at Inveresk.
Curiouser and curiouser!
Tess Brunton
I recently returned from across the ditch where I worked at New Zealand Fairfax paper The Timaru Herald and developed a love of mountains. Originally I'm a mainlander from an area known for cheese, the Bega Valley, who also dabbled in radio at ABC RCAFF before finding a place in newspapers. I can often be found hiking, caving or climbing when I'm not cursing at my work computer or technology in general.
I recently returned from across the ditch where I worked at New Zealand Fairfax paper The Timaru Herald and developed a love of mountains. Originally I'm a mainlander from an area known for cheese, the Bega Valley, who also dabbled in radio at ABC RCAFF before finding a place in newspapers. I can often be found hiking, caving or climbing when I'm not cursing at my work computer or technology in general.
