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Invited speaker Dr. James Hlongawane opened the first session of the conference by providing his view of the challenges and opportunities facing the science centre movement in Southern Africa. An overview from within SAASTEC was provided by the organisation's President, Mike Bruton. He summarised the status of centres in Southern Africa and in particular focussed on the proposal for flagship and satellite science centres that was developed (for free) during 2003 at the request of the SA Department of Arts and Science. He expresssed disquiet at the sudden appearance in the SA government gazette of a request for proposals for a plan for science centres for which R700 000 is available, apparently disregarding the work done by SAASTEC, who are the representative body of professionals in the field. Derek Fish of Unizul Science Centre provided a more optimistic view, based on the ability to build interactives in Southern Africa at a fraction of the cost of construction overseas.
Beverley Damonse, the recently appointed Director of SAASTA, gave a thoughtful overview of the new mandate and role of her organisation, now repositioned within the NRF. All the National Facilities of the NRF run science centres or outreach programmes, and it is my hope that the creation of SAASTA will help to strengthen both these activities and those outside the NRF.
A theme of the conference that was reflected in a number of talks was progress at science centres in SAASTEC. Alfred Tsipa described the benefits of overseas collaboration in the form of 'Science on the Move' - a collection of mobile interactives cloned from Questacon in Australia courtesy of Mike Gore. This is being used very successfully as a mobile science centre traveling out to schools from its base at the Unizul Science Centre. Saskia Kempff showed the Discovery Centre at the Transvaal Museum now in successful operation, its theme being hands-on Nature rather than the more usual physics-oriented interactives.
By contrast, Sci-Bono in the Electric Workshop, Newtown, Johannesburg is an impressively large scale project in the process of creation. Richard Waller described its progress towards the opening of the first phase at the end of this year. This project benefits from having the Gauteng Education Department as a major stakeholder and source of funding from the outset, a situation that may be the envy of a number of local science centres.
The Discoverymobile operated by the Cape Technikon is a mobile science centre now in its fifth year of operation, and was eloquently described by Melanie Stark.
Dan Khoza described new developments at the Gold Reef City Science Centre that operates as part of an entertainent complex within Johannesburg, on the site of what was one of the early gold mines. This centre started off equipped with the interactives from the closed Bristol Exploratory. In the same way, the interactives that were in the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology have found their way to the Unizul Science Centre, finding a new life in Africa.
The Boyden Science Centre outside Bloemfontein is funded and in construction, and Matie Hofmann of the University of the Free State indicated that this will be followed by a science centre within the city.
Dr. Tony Pell from the Universities of Leicester and Cambridge gave a fascinating talk on how he established the Giyani Science Centre in what was then a bantustan in the apartheid years, in the face of harrassment by government agents. Progress in South Africa since then was demonstrated by the discussion on the justification for special programmes for girls presented by Elmary Buis from Giyani.
Skills and techniques for science centre professionals were the subject of several talks. Dirk Durnez covered the ins and outs of exhibit building, Stuart Hopwood of the Telkom Exploratorium remains a firm fan of stainless steel for exhibit building, while Ian Bester also of TE described well the need for the evaluation of interactives once on the floor. Mike Gaylard of HartRAO and Ina Roos of SAASTA motivated for good photos of science centres in action, and Daphne Lekgwathi of HartRAO challenged the audience with a two-minute competition to design the best sign to go with whisper dishes.
New themes for sciences centres were proposed. Terry Hutter of the Exploration Place in Kansas showed how weather makes a good subject for bringing science to schools, its location in Tornado Alley being a powerful motivator for this. By contrast, geology was a theme with two eleoquent proponents, Ian McKay of the University of the Witwatersrand and W Grote of the University of Pretoria.
A welcome development was the inclusion of a presentation by an educationist on research into learning that takes place in science centres. The presenter was Tony Lelliot of the University of the Witwtersrand, who described the state of his investigations at the Johannesburg Planetarium and at HartRAO.
Equally welcome was a presentation on research being carried out from within a science centre. In this case the presenter was Shadrack Mahapa of the UNIN Science centre (and the host of the conference), who has been investigating attitudes in the local community towards lightning strikes as human orchestrated events rather than as natural phenomena. The quality of his presentation earned Shadrack the award for best presentation at the conference. Both these two examples of research are towards PhDs for their authors.
The demonstration competition showed a considerable range of talent, Derek Fish and Alfred Tsipa winning in performance that showed the value of being able to blow your own trumpet (and nose flute, harmonica, triangle, mbira, ocarina, marimba, etc).
At the annual general meeting on the Wednesday morning, two new members were elected to the SAASTEC Council, these being Kebadire Basaako who takes over as Botswana representative from Nick Ndaba, and Daniel Mphokela of the Discovery Centre at TUKS. The formal proposal by Namibia to host the next SAASTEC conference was accepted.
At the subsequent meeting of the new SAASTEC Council, Shadrack Mahapa was elected President and Derek Fish, Vice-President.
