In the News

02.13.2004

"Invention in Progress: Panel Crafting Science Center Hammers Out What Will Pull People In"

by Mike Swift in the Hartford Courant

NEW HAVEN -- With $114 million in hand, the Connecticut Center for Science & Exploration is leaping ahead with its development, hoping to break ground in Hartford as soon as next year.

Thursday at Yale University, a committee headed by Yale President Richard C. Levin began the crucial work of crafting what will go inside the box, and the first real specifics about the center's program emerged.

The $160 million center is expected to include an IMAX-type theater screening educational films by day and Hollywood films at night, along with a cafe and a museum shop. But the real focus will be using the Connecticut River, space, crime analysis, the human body and other scientific topics as a means to let school kids and their families actually do science.

By allowing students to participate in science experiences, the center's planners hope to enrich science instruction for the more than 600,000 primary and secondary school students in Connecticut, and to spark more students to pursue careers in science or technology.

The science center, proposed for land on the riverfront adjacent to the Connecticut Convention Center at Adriaen's Landing, plans to be a statewide educational institution, with an appeal to families and school children as its primary focus. Tourism will be an important, but secondary, goal.

The center's exhibits will prompt children and visitors to think about the ideas and principles behind science, rather than simply imparting facts. So although there will be exhibits on the plants and animals of the Connecticut River, it would be a different experience from an aquarium, said Theodore S. Sergi, the center's president.

"In an aquarium, you walk up and you look," Sergi said Thursday. The science center will have a more applied approach, he said: "Can you find a way to engage the student in something, in that learning, that makes them remember it and be able to use it? We will need an experience that lets them mix water, plant life, animal life, air and pollutants together" to study what happens in the river.

The program committee also includes teachers from Branford and Portland, Cromwell's school superintendent, a United Technologies Corp. engineer who helped design the Saturn V rocket, and forensic expert Henry Lee, former public safety commissioner, who arrived at Thursday's meeting fresh from a crime scene.

Lee is expected to be particularly responsible for a big draw at the science center - allowing students to walk into a mock crime scene and apply scientific techniques and their logic to "solve" the crime, as though they were on the popular "CSI" television shows.

"You talk about unique; that's unique, the only one like it in the world," Lee said.

Lee said he might even be able to help raise funds for the science center by giving regular talks on how police are solving crimes in the news, such as the Laci Peterson killing or the Kobe Bryant rape case.

"I'm sure you could sell a lot of tickets," Lee said.

Levin's committee is trying to develop the program to a point that would allow the beginning of architect selection this summer, a year ahead of schedule. With the state money in hand to construct the building, Sergi said the optimistic date for completion is now 2007, for a project that had not been expected to be open until 2008 or 2009.

On Thursday, the program committee struggled to find the right balance between instruction and excitement, to decide what age range of students to target, and to what degree the center should stress the history and the future of Connecticut technology.

With Lee and oceanographer Robert Ballard expected to be involved in the science center's programs, committee member John Cassidy said the center needed to leverage the draw of those Connecticut personalities.

"These are unique personalities who have agreed to be involved in this," said Cassidy, the senior technology officer for UTC who worked on the Saturn V. "We're not using them enough."

The program committee's work is a key part of the entire project because the center's program will drive the building's design.

"This building is going to be designed from the inside, from the inside out," said Mark Wolman of Wolman Construction, a member of the committee and a private developer at Adriaen's Landing.

"The question is what combination of things will people get off the highway for," said Mark Cohan, the Cromwell superintendent. "Start with that."

Sergi told legislators this week that the science and exploration center could become the keystone of a statewide consortium with existing science centers and museums in Bridgeport, New London and New Haven, an organization that would work together to raise federal money, share exhibits and perhaps collaborate on purchases.

Sergi, former education commissioner, said the changing array of exhibits would be coordinated with the state's public-school science curriculum as much as possible. The center won't just bring students to Hartford, but would take its programs to schools around the state, Sergi told legislators at a public hearing Monday.

It was an approach that appeared to win points, as several legislators praised the concept and Rep. Cameron Staples of New Haven, a Democratic member of the education committee, told Sergi not to hesitate to come back for more money if needed. The State Bond Commission has already approved $92 million for the project.

The plan the committee began working out Thursday would feature exhibits on topics such as the Connecticut River, and astronomy and traveling to space that would change over time.

The science center still needs to raise $36 million from private sources. At about 160,000 square feet, the Hartford center will be in the midsize range for American science centers - larger than science centers in Baltimore and Cleveland that draw more than 500,000 visitors a year, but smaller than centers in Tampa, Minneapolis and Boston.

One question that has yet to be resolved is whether the science center will include a planetarium.

Levin said he doubted that a planetarium - a feature that he said could be very expensive - would make financial sense at the Hartford center.

"You've got the world's greatest planetarium 90 miles away" at the Museum of Natural History in New York, Levin said.

A discussion of this story with Courant Staff Writer Mike Swift is scheduled to be shown on New England Cable News each half-hour today between 9 a.m. and noon.