The author with his benefactor at the Mind Museum entrance
I was fortunate enough to get an early look at The Mind Museumthanks to a friend of my sister’s, herself an employee of Ayala Land, Inc. (one of the companies behind this project).
Mind Museum is found in the heart of Bonifacio Global City, a short walk away from St. Luke’s Medical Center. In fact, if you went to Morning Mercato Saturday or Sunday, you could just walk your way down to the Mind Museum later that day.
The view from outside. The author's sister and some tree repairmen
also in shot
However, the facility is booked a month in advance, so if you live far and you don't need to go there immediately, I recommend waiting a few months.
T-Rex display.
Mind Museum brings me back to the days of the old Ripley’s museum in Shang Ri-La. Even if you’re not particularly techie minded or nerdy, it’s an overwhelming sensory overload that's hard to resist. You really won't think you're learning anything as you check out and play with all the different exhibits on hand.
I also want to commend the Mind Museum for bringing a lot of local color to their presentation. In the vestibule going into the main floor they have a section dedicated to Filipino scientists. Similarly relevant exhibits are littered throughout the museum. This addition makes me feel hopeful and is to be commended. I do have concerns about it being a video presentation. More on that below.
The Filipino Scientists exhibit. Make sure you see this when you go there.
These are my concerns with the Mind Museum as it is now. Some exhibits are not clear or easy to understand on their own, with some lacking descriptive captions or having the captions placed in inconspicuous areas. Also, technical issues abound. There was a short outage in part of the facility when I was there and some exhibits do say that they are a work in progress. While not deal breakers in any way, you might as well know that the place is not perfect.
I also see a few practical limitations. Mainly, there is simply no way you can fully grasp everything in the Mind Museum in one trip. It will take you less than two hours to go through the whole facility, but you might as well forget trying to squeeze every little piece of learning you can in there. Of course, if you can afford it, it's all the more reason to want to take return trips to the facility.
One of many video screens people are just passing by
For those exhibits that have or depend on short video presentations, it’s hard to be patient enough to sit through one of those when the large scale exhibits and interactive sections are far more stimulating. Also, the videos aren't really loud enough to grab attention. This is understandable in that you would want to avoid people getting distracted by them, but I think the video exhibits need to be thought out again.
Giant human brain. Now we're talking! :D
In my mind, it’s the giant Human Mind exhibit and not the T-Rex which is the highlight of all the large scale exhibits. The T-Rex skeleton is a tourist attraction for sure, BUT a closer look will let you know it’s not up to scale and the bones are not very accurate. I take particular offense at the bottom rib bones bound up together like a book spine. The brain, however, it’s big and it's impressive. All the main parts are identified and labeled and you can walk through the two lobes. It's certainly eye catching and the sort of thing that can grab your imagination. It's representative of the best the Mind Museum has to offer and what you can expect to find there.
Overall, I don't have to convince you to go to the Mind Museum. There have been more than enough press releases and blog posts about it. If you're reading this, you're probably already convinced you want to go, or at least curious enough to find it. Here's a map showing where it is in relation to St. Luke's/ S&R.
If you are bringing a car, you'll be happy to know that parking around the area is plentiful. There's an open lot at the left side and parking areas in the entrance and back of the building. Here's another map showing the parking lots.
You can also commute to the Mind Museum. For those not in the know, there is a bus route that goes through Bonifacio Global City, with pickups at Market Market and Fort Bus Terminal, beside Ayala MRT station. I've embedded the maps below for easy reference. Bear in mind that the bus will only drop you off at specified stops, so check the maps for the most convenient way.
West Route
BGC Central
East Route
You can get directions on how to go to Fort Bonifacio (Global City) itself here and more information on the Global City bus routes here.
Simply put, exercise makes our brains perform better. Experiments showed that people who exercise improve their capacities for long term memory, reasoning, attention, problem solving and other tasks. In plain English, they improve abilities that will make them perform better in school and at work.
Proof: It Works For Kids, Too
2010 Evers Ding
Other research shows that this is just as true for kids as adults. Studies categorized children in terms of physical fitness (on a treadmill), put them through a series of cognitive tests and then scanned their brains. They confirmed that the children who performed better at the treadmill also did better at tests and appeared to have more highly developed brains. Other tests also show improved scores in sedentary kids taking similar tests after they start even the most basic aerobic activities. It should be noted that it is currently aerobic exercise that has been proven to increase brain function.
What Exercises Should Your Tech Kiddie Get Into?
How does this affect you and your tech kiddie? Simply put, your kid will be smarter and perform better in school if they do aerobic exercises. This covers wide a range of activities including running, skipping rope, swimming, cycling, etc. Walking is aerobic activity. Additionally, research shows that dancing video games, such as Dance Dance Revolution, are also good as aerobic exercise.
Table Tennis: The Best Brain Sport?
2007 Jasper Fields, Flickr
Surprisingly, Dr. Daniel Amen, in his book Making A Good Brain Great, claims that Table tennis is the best brain sport. It provides aerobic exercise, improves hand eye coordination, uses both your upper and lower body and makes you use different areas of your brain.
So, is your tech kiddie also a sporty kiddie? What kinds of sports are you getting him or her into? Share your stories and thoughts.
Meet our featured Tech Kiddie of the week - Piper!
Piper is a 2 years and 4 month-old girl living in Quezon City, Philippines with her mom - Ethel and dad - Alvan.
Piper taking photos
What is your techkiddie tinkering with right now?
"Samsung Galaxy Y"
Why does she like or love playing with the new gadget?
"Probably because it is the most responsive device to her little fingers so far, that plus it has a good number of functions."
Your Proud Parent Moment!
"Let me give you two.
One was when my daughter was able to use the laptop touchpad, something I consider harder than using the attached mouse. Today she handles it like a pro."
This is her "work space."
"The second would be the way she handles the camera on the Android smartphone. She requested that she take the picture one day, I said yes... and she was able to pull off a rather decent shot."
Piper's very first shots with the camera phone below.
What rules do you have at home on using gadgets?
"At this point not any really, although I will try to monitor how long she uses devices (particularly media) in the future. At this point she gets bored quickly enough with any device."
Piper taking photos
What are your thoughts on schools using web and mobile technologies to teach kids?
"No problem with how often and would love to see it more. How it would be used in a way that will enhance learning though is the thing to scrutinize. Schools can be lazy about that."
Do you want to feature your techie kid? Do you have a proud parent moment too?
Famed Studio Ghibli head animator and director Hayao Miyazaki has often said that he dislikes modern technology, including gadgets like the iPad. He may seem stiff and old fashioned, but I think we need to put these statements in proper context. To quote him from an interview three years ago:
Young people are surrounded by virtual things. They lack real experience of life and lose their imaginations. source
To a certain degree, I think Miyazaki has a point. If your kids borrow and use your gadgets, it's probably to play games or watch their favorite music videos. A lot of those activities do not amount to anything more than consumption.
But, I disagree with Miyazaki in assuming that all they can do is make children 'lose their imaginations.' On the contrary, gadgets can be great creative outlets. Taking photos, making music, and making doodles are some of the great things kids can make that can spark their creativity. However, if you want to jump start that creativity into developing high level skills they can use later in life, your techie kid should learn programming.
Do not fret about a steep learning curve or boring knowledge base, programming doesn't have to be all that. Here are a few suggested applications (actually, programming environments) that will help your child get started in the world of programming.
Developed by the MIT and boasting a predominantly below eighteen-year-old user base, Scratch is a programming language that caters to children. Instead of having to learn jargon from the ground up, users form logical sentences to input commands on a cheery and colorful GUI. Aside from it's easy to learn but highly flexible interface, Scratch credits much of its success to allowing users to personalize their work, as well as to remix and reuse other people's Scratch projects into new ones. As such, Scratch creations are all made under Creative Commons licenses.
A Carnegie Mellon University project, Alice is a 3D programming environment, much like Scratch, designed to interest children with its ease of use based on forming logical sentences. A variant called Storytelling Alice, created by Caitlin Kelleher for her doctoral degree, is even better at doing this than the original. Storytelling Alice focuses on a particular application - telling stories using Alice's ability to create 3D animation. You might think this is a minor change, but it's been proven to engage more children - particularly young women - into the world of programming. Therefore, for those parents blessed to be raising techie girls, Storytelling Alice is an ideal starting point.
KidsRuby uses a different approach from Scratch! and Storytelling Alice in teaching children how to program. KidsRuby actually runs the programming language Ruby in the process of teaching you how to use it. What makes KidsRuby child-friendly is that it provides dual screens for you to see what you wrote in and what that code would output. KidsRuby also allows you to play with Turtle graphics, and will work with Hackety Hack and Gosu, other tools that will help your child learn Ruby.
Truth be told, Ruby (as well as its most common application framework, Ruby on Rails) is hard to master. If your child ever was going to become a programmer later in life, learning the basics of Ruby early on will give them the edge they need.
Initiated by Google and now maintained by MIT, App Inventor will allow you to make Android Apps without any knowledge of programming. Using either an Android emulator or device, you will be able to test your app real time even while you are developing it, and you can produce an installable standalone application once it's completed.
App Inventor was not designed with children in mind, so it might not be as kid-friendly as others in this list. However, it still uses an easy to understand GUI, and you will be able to make real apps that will run on Android devices. This might be the ultimate programming app your techie kid has been looking for.
All these programming environments are open source and will work on Windows, Mac or Linux.
Are your techie kids learning to program now? What else would you recommend? If you are using one of the above mentioned applications now, feel free to share your experiences here as well.
I was fortunate to accompany this blog's webmaster Fleire Castro, her husband Mark and son David, to a trip to the Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center.
The center promotes itself as the first interactive science theme park in the country, although I would not call it the first educational theme park here. I have fond childhood memories of the old Ripley's Believe it or Not! Odditorium in Shangri-La Ortigas myself, and of course other amusement parks have educational sections in them in the past. Given the recent launch of the Mind Museum, it seemed interesting to take a look at what this facility has going for it now.
AT THE ENTRANCE
TechKiddie webmaster Fleire Castro and her darling son David at the entrance to the Science Discovery Center
Not really sure if this is a genuine spacesuit, a practice suit (they made many that never went to space) or just a replica
Mark and David putting in the tickets to enter Discovery Center
Unfortunately, it seems we were only able to experience part of the Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center since we only did a walk-in. The facility was apparently made for fully guided tours. A lot of the amazing things in the tour were not explained to us when we were there, and honestly, I found out more about when I looked them up after the tour. We were able to see most of the facilities, and reviews of each section will be provided below.
The first two things we run across at the entrance are the AR reality game and the Gravitram
Augmented reality game at the entrance. Moving your shadows close to the
insects makes them move away. Contrary to expectations, you can't kill
the insects. Instead, you can move food that keeps getting generated to
bring them to a certain spot.
Gravitram up close
Gravitrams are kinetic ball rolling structures that have balls going across cold wires shaped like tubes. It all looks like a giant pinball machine gone awry. Watch a gravitram in action here.
What makes the Gravitram at SDC unique is as the ball falls down the hole at the bottom, it takes forever to fall. If you want to know how that looks and why it happens that way, you'll have to go there yourself :)
SMART MEDIA CITY
The Smart Media City section is the first real section, or 'gallery', we see. It's full of educational games set up in small PC and tablet mockups. I think I would have had more fun with them if I had the time to play, but we caught up to the place just before closing hours. On the surface, it looked like their PC games were of the graphic adventure genre.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Yes, they had the Windows classic series of 'games', Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was worth trying out for a little while. They had chairs and the cockpit set up conveniently so that you could try flying your plane yourself. Of course, this can't be expected to be that authentic a simulation, but considering this was for kids, that was OK.
The author (clearly) faking enthusiasm
TRANSPORTATION NATION
Transportation Nation really wasn't much of an exhibit. All they promised to offer on the site was a Segway, a Wheel Surf and a Shell Vintage car. To make things worse, the Shell car wasn't even there! I do hope the car is only going through restoration, and that it hasn't been compromised by being on exhibit or anything.
For all its worth, the Segway.
For all those who don't know what this is, the Segway is a two wheeled self-transportation vehicle from 2001 that was supposed to revolutionize the way we moved around. Eventually, safety concerns and prohibitive costs kept it from catching on, but it enjoys limited use in tourism. Fleire's family were actually able to ride a similar device near SM Mall of Asia earlier in the day.
And here's the Wheelsurf, a brand of modern day monowheel.
Here's a picture of an earlier monowheel, dating 1933.
Anime fans may recognize the monowheel from the movie Steamboy:
Like the Segway, the monowheel is a hobbyist toy more than anything else, but unlike the Segway, it is non-proprietary and reinventions of it keep propping up. The latest of these is the McLean V8 Drag Wheel, which was just created last year.
When you're done looking at the vehicles, try to keep an eye out for these. They are Pag-Asa's weather monitoring equipment. Yes, the same equipment placed in high risk areas. It's a shame that once again, not being in a tour meant no one was going to explain this for us.
GROSSOLOGY
Grossology is a faux arcade setup, where each arcade game is educational in nature and free to play. They also have this gross theme going on with all the games. Again, nothing that special, but enjoyable for a little while. There are no pictures but they also had this giant Grossology quiz game.
Mark and David bonding moment
This game, which resemble coin luck machines in arcades IMHO, release different sounds and smells when you press the buttons. You can actually put your hand in one of the openings at the side to smell the thing you heard.
Giant sized Operation!
This little shadow game pictured below is called Fear Factoids. We found this at the very end of Grossology, near the planitarium. The blurb at the bottom explains giant cat's fight-or-flight response system, while you try to keep the fruits falling from the tree away from the cat so that he or she does not get scared.
If the cat gets hit with too much fruit, it's gonna come after you! The science being explained here might go over your child's head while playing this, so make sure to explain it to them.
DIGISTAR PLANETARIUM
The Castro family and the author
Finally, we got to the highlight of our visit: the Digistar Planetarium, and the feature presentation, Ultimate Universe, directed by Mike Murray. We were not allowed to take photos or video of the film although we have photos of the facility itself. We have little experience in it locally before this, but fulldome format film has been around for a little while now, mostly in the service of presenting short cinematic educational features. As best as I can tell, we were watching single projector film.
We didn't have good pictures of the actual spherical dome the film was projected on, but this video should give you an idea of what it looks like.
The film itself was an overview of galaxies, planets and celestial bodies. Each cosmic event was explained as we saw it in rich detail. If your kid is a fan of astrology, they will get a kick out of this show. Bear in mind that planetarium features are changed every hour, so you'll want to pick which movie you want to see carefully.
After watching our little movie, we went up to the second floor to see the rest of the exhibits. Sadly, we don't seem to have good pictures of Spaceship Earth, but it's basically a hollow mockup of the planet, with a polar bear/ ice caps game/educational segment inside.
VIRTUAL REEF
The Virtual Reef might interest you; it's a mockup of what the coral reefs look like up close. If the pictures seem too dark, that's only because of the contrast between the darkness within the room and the small lit diorama displays surrounding it.
Mr. T
Mr. T is a little interactive segment at the end of the reef. This talking fish will answer any questions you ask him, but it's a guy with a microphone hiding at the back of an animated thing.
ROBOT CITY
Now, my favorite part, Robot City!
Astroboy
The Maestro. This musical robot was supposed to play music for us, but its fingers didn't raise up even as the programmed song started playing. I guess we were supposed to play along, but it didn't look it would when we tried.
You know what this is
Robot (Model B9) from late '60s sci fi TV opera Lost in Space. His kid brother Robby was also there.
Robot's bro Robby The Robot, who's appeared in numerous media, starting with 1956 film Forbidden Planet
Robo-Test. On display but under repair
Another really glaring bad spot in the exhibit. This setup would allow us to move the robots around using joysticks, but it was broke when we were there.
At least the joysticks look nice.
CITY SCIENCE
This is one of many dioramas, this one I believe in the City Science section demonstration different forms of energy sources. This is another one of those things that might not grab your child's attention that well, but they're very nice so it would be a shame if they missed it.
City Science also has an earthquake simulator, allowing you to simulate the feeling of an earthquake while a deadpan narrator explains everything going on. Grownups, you could have fun with this.
This is the earthquake simulator narrator. She's got composure.
The author gets nauseous easily.
The final stop, and one I found jarring, was a fully functional Xbox Kinect, apparently for the kids to cool off after a rough day of learning. I honestly was not impressed by this, but maybe your children will enjoy it if they try it.
Overall, I was not fully satisfied with my experience, but I could still recommend this to parents of young kids, from toddlers to middle childhood. I do not think adolescents will enjoy this tour very much, so be mindful of how old your child is before you bring them here.
As I had mentioned earlier, the center has a lot of interesting things in it, and you can always do a walk-in when you're in the area, but it seems the best way to experience this would be to get a guided tour, that usually lasts two hours. Walk-in rates are PH P 330 per head. Scheduled tours require a minimun 40 heads, but the price would then go down to PH P 250 each. They also offer birthday party packages, with the lowest starting at PH P 18,010 for 50 heads on a weekday. Whether you take a tour or walk-in, the fee is inclusive of one planetarium show.
I also recommend you set aside a few hours so that you can take your time seeing everything, and hopefully, have other people in it with you. I don't think you have to be there first thing in the morning, but they're open 10 AM to 8 PM so it won't be waiting for you at night. If you can set a day aside to go straight there after lunch, I think that would be best.
Regarding discounts: Nestle or SM may occasionally run a discount, but it's hard to get information on them. Unfortunately, the site itself does not seem to update on what promos are available. Do bring an SM Advantage card if you or a friend has one for a discount.
Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center is found in Southside Entertainment Mall, part of SM Mall of Asia, Pasay City. Fortunately, the Mall of Asia website has an easy to navigate flash map. Go to 'View All Store Name' Option at the very bottom right of the map and choose 'Science Discovery Center'.
You can check out Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center's website here and go to their Facebook page here.
