Sunita80
★★2.0Wrote on 22 Aug 2023
Worst experience
It is very disappointing to say it was a bad experience of going to National Science Centre in respect of food, logistics, comfort and security. A school picnic is a break from work for both students and teachers. In addition to improving children’s mental health, it is also beneficial for their physical health. But, it is regretted to inform you that National Science Centre was overcrowded, students of more than 3-4 schools were there, long queues for toilets, lunch, drinking water as no water bottle was allowed inside the premises. Among those students, there were many ill-mannered school boys of different school of class 9/10th who started using foul language loudly between them. Apart from this, no well educated staff was there at such prestigious place. Rather the staff providing lunch was ‘ABUSIVE’. When my ward asked for the food/lunch as buffet after standing in long queue she was ill treated with ‘Foul Language’. After such bad behaviour, my child did not have her food. The story does not end here. The place is not at all centrally AIR CONDITIONED, it was mostly quite hot, suffocative and sweaty in all areas. My child came home ‘dehydrated’.
MadhulikaL4
★★★3.0Wrote on 1 Jul 2022
A mix of fairly technical and crowd-friendly
Part of the Pragati Maidan experience, the National Science Centre is situated at the end of Bhairon Marg, well beyond the Crafts Museum. The ticket counter outside dispenses entry tickets (Rs 70 per person, though concessional rates are available for groups), as well as special tickets for different shows at the centre. Since there is no written information about what these shows are, or what their timings are, my eight-year old daughter and I decided to only take entry tickets and skip the shows. The Centre spreads out across three floors; you can proceed in a fairly logical path, which we did by going up to the first floor. Here, there’s a history of science and technology in India: astronomy, the human body, metallurgy, weaving, medicine, weaponry, architecture and other aspects of science in life shown through a series of dioramas, text, and so on. There are sections on development of science and technology in medieval and modern India too, and then there are other concepts from different fields of science: evolution and natural history (there’s a large, dark area ‘inhabited’ by rather badly ‘moving’ models of dinosaurs, which gives you a feel of what it might have been to inhabit the world alongside them); the human body and its many wonders; genetics (along with related fields like cloning, GM, etc); medicine; and a large, very popular section on fun with science—with concepts (mostly physics) being explained through highly interactive games, experiences, and so on. I found this a mix of experiences. A lot of the exhibits are obviously meant to cater to a lay person, using interactivity (sometimes not very creatively) to explain concepts. But the language used to explain these concepts is so technical that even a genuinely interested lay person (like me) would find it difficult to grasp. Some of it, like the sections on genetics, are really too high-brow for most non-scientific people to understand. But the models and dioramas, and the ‘fun with science’ section is generally more lay person-friendly. My daughter loved the mirror maze and the optical illusions in the fun with science area, and didn’t want to leave this space. If you really want to understand all of it and go through it slowly, plan on spending 3-4 hours here. You can zip through in about an hour and a half, though, if you don’t spend much time at each exhibit. Shows are additional, both time-wise and money-wise.
