August 19, 2024

SCIENCE NORTH YOURS TO DISCOVER … AND SO MUCH MORE IN MUSKOKA’S BACKYARD

Photos, story Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com

SUDBURY — Science North is to northern Ontario what the Ontario Science Centre was to Toronto.

Petri dishes — here shaped like snowflakes — that foster mindful growth in cultivating ageless grey cells to become aware of natural surroundings in a wondrously lightning-fast paced planetary world.

The applications and implications of which boggle the mind.

Curious families have been delightfully delirious in digging, crawling and exploring Science North since June 1984 when it opened.

Forty years later its city sister closed this summer, leaving SciNor a science outlier in Sudbury. One designed by the same architect, Raymond Moriyama, who imaged the Ontario Science Centre.

The void is easily filled within two hours of Muskoka in a return trip that has you home after dinner filled with enough STEM sustenance to sustain anyone through the daily garbage in, garbage out brain drain.

The inspiring awe witnessed last Monday by wide-eyed kids and their broad-mouthed adult accompanists should ensure the stellar future of the exploratory experience for this term of government.

**Entering Science North from the Vale Cavern is the start of a wonderous journey of exploration of going beyond your bounds. So pack up and let’s see where it takes us …. Photos Mark Clairmont**

Tunnelling in from the Vale Cavern entrance where IMAX, 3D and Planetarium theatres take you where no smart phone can with T-Rex, Arctic and Galactic time travel.

And join their Climate Quest: Small Steps to Big Change. Their mission is to inspire one million youth (and more) across Canada to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and help Canada achieve its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. See what other change makers from across the country are doing to take action and share your own climate story to motivate others to get involved.

It’s a whale of good time from the start as you wend your way up a ramp walkway around a massive white suspended skeletal fin whale and through the five-floor discovery centre filled with a baffling array of puzzles that allow questions and puzzles to challenge and be resolved by you as your queries about life and science are lived and learned.

**Short or tall, from Muskoka to Moosonee the nature of science will fill any size kid’s head with what it’s like to live in northern Ontario.**

The easily accessible and welcoming format beyond hundreds of eye-candy exhibits are dozens of hands-on visitor work stations that are pure joyous theatre performance art. Like actually enjoying a school science class writ large.

Matter matters we learn in the Discovery Theatre — a five-level study hall built in a horse-shoe shape like a medical school lab where potions are mixed and explode on a safe slab of burnt lab top burnished with past results from brimming frothy beakers and test tubes overflowing on Bunsen burners.

The “Blue Coat” scientist running off at the mouth with a verbal Q&A with the audience while debunking myths about chemical causes and reactions. She’s like a one ring circus master juggling swords and slicing and dicing flying fruit. A virtual Vego-matic ventriloquist.

Throughout the twisting, towering self-guided tour are dozens off and on workshops and staffed study labs that let visitors stop, stand, gaze and amaze.

**From the head to tail of this fin whale there’s a winding, evolution of exploration around every corner on every floor that will take you the best part of the day to enjoy to it s fullest.**

Along the paths of enlightenment are numerous touchy, feely engagement opportunities that mix the marvels of technology (a must for inquisitive kids) that see right through you going beneath the skin that let your skeleton dance across a screen.

See the anatomy of birth, do brain surgery, lie on a bed of nails, step lively to keep a balloon afloat in a basket of air.

While sadly the popular Science North mascot “Kash” has graduated to a new more socially compatible beaver dam environment, there are other reptiles and critters to share time with — including the flighty Jean MacLeod Butterfly Room a hot house solarium filled with hundreds of colourful flora that live off the leafy fauna.

Sudbury’s roots and its own backyard aren’t forgotten either.

In a novel nod referencing its rocky road to success — and NASA’s astronaut moonscape training ground — there’s lunar landing for those willing to be slung up in a harness to acquaint themselves with the gravity-defying weightless feeling of bounding across Earth’s nearest celestial neighbourhood craters.