About

Undertake a quest across land, sea, and space to explore the role of mapping and navigation in everyday life. Visitors will find the seven ‘quest’ stations to solve puzzles and collect different parts of their own map, which can then be viewed and brought to life through augmented reality.

Maps are created using layers of data to help us understand the world around us and guide how we interact with it. Mapping and navigation has been at the heart of the human experience since the dawn of our species, underpinning advancements in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) over millennia.

In Explore Your World visitors will use different navigational tools and techniques to find their way through dangerous reefs and shipwrecks, escape a virtual building in an emergency, and pilot a simulated underwater exploration vehicle. They can operate a real sonar scanner to map themselves and their friends, or take on the challenge of a giant game of Battleships.

Throughout Explore Your World visitors will be captivated and surprised in the quest to explore cities, oceans, and the night sky, and develop their own mapping skills as they complete the quest map and uncover hidden layers of information.

EXHIBITS

• Escape the Building: Can you memorize a map to escape a virtual building in an emergency?
• Battleship: Challenge a friend to a giant game of battleships using coordinates
• GPS: Match up GPS markers to locate places on Earth using triangulation
• Ocean Explorer: Pilot a virtual underwater robotic vehicle to map the ocean
• Compasses: Explore how magnetic fields affect the direction of a compass
• Bearings: Follow a series of bearings to find a location
• Build Your Town: Try to recreate a town using images from different perspectives
• Layers of Data: Investigate global data sets such as ocean currents or wind patterns
• Real size: Move countries around on screen to compare their true size
• Navigation Hazards: Guide a friend through the ocean, avoiding hazards
• Celestial Navigation: Use the stars and your own body to to measure angles and find bearings to navigate by
• Satellite Stitching: Match the strips of satellite imagery to build a map
• Sonar Scan: Build and map different objects, and yourself, using a scanner
• Stackable Contours: Stack up foam shapes to make a contour map
• Track the Ducks: Follow the currents by tracking the movements of the ducks. Can you spot any ducks hidden around some of the other exhibits?
• Map Projection: Assemble a 3D globe or 2D projection on a magnetic wall and icosahedron
• Contours: Match the hill or valley profile to the contour map
• AR Sandbox: Create elevations in a sandbox and see projected contours
• Map Checker: View a completed map through the map checker, bringing it to life in 3D using augmented reality

KEY MESSAGES

• The human need to understand and explore our world drives developments in science and technology
• Maths provides the framework to map our surroundings
• Maps are layers of data that help us to visualize the world and how it works
• There are many useful and inspiring careers using mapping, navigation and data visualization

SCIENCE LINKS

• Geography
• Mathematics
• Engineering, Geology
• Communication
• Astronomy and Space Science
• Physics

Size

4,300–6,500 sq ft

400–600 sq m