BM: I'm intrigued by what goes in the Discovery room cause I haven't seen it being used that much. Do you have any plans for it?
HF: It's it's an interesting area. It's one that I sort of wasn't supposed to have. It's not supposed to be a public programmes are, it's always been a schools area. It always was an area that schools could come into. They could have a session in the discovery room um and - you know, go away again, basically. But we've discovered that schools don't like coming in for that, they'd ra- because it's too similar to what they can do in the classroom. So they want it to be, what they want is the science theatre or the planetarium, stuff they can't do.
So in the discovery room you'll find that there are these things called curiosity boxes and you might find one on say teeth, you might find one on bridges, I found one on electricity magnetism. Got a box, open it up and there's 4 or 5 different activities that you can do in each once. You can - stay for as a little or as short a time as you like with each one. So you might just get the first one out and - build your first bridge and "that's enough of that" put it away and go swap it over with something else. Or you may go "That was a cool bridge. I'll build another one" you know. And off you go.
So there are - again it's completely flexible it's nice, it's a nice area but - it's - it's been someone else's responsibility. Right from the off it's been their baby and - they've just sort of come to a point where it's like, you know, it's become a bit stagnant needs fresh eyes looking at it. Which is why - it's, it's now mine. And also because most people who use it are members of the public who use it at the weekends. So it makes sense that it came over to public programmes and we lend the boxes to schools when they take them out on discovery workshops ( ). So they do take them out to school but schools weren't prepared to come in for it.
Yeah. Plans for it in the future? Well we've just got some new furniture in there which will make it look a bit more - modern. So that's quite a good start. And we need some new discovery boxes but it's - we need money for it, as ever. So they need a new they all need revamping, they're all getting a bit tired.