Nuts and Bolts

Abstract

Mikko Myllykoski is Experience Director at Heureka, The Finnish Science Centre. He may be contacted at Mikko.Myllykoski@heureka.fi. The science center field is young and rapidly growing. Some start the counting from the Exploratorium and the Ontario Science Centre in 1969. Twenty years later there were 240 science centers worldwide, today more than 2400. One of the institutions that was opened in 1989, is Heureka, the Finnish science centre, a museum that on an average attracts 280,000 visitors annually in a 2-hour drive catchment area of 2,100,000 inhabitants. We wanted to pay homage to the achievements of the field by designing a whole exhibition gallery, Heureka Classics, for its 20th anniversary. The idea was to recycle some of our very best exhibits, many known from the Exploratorium Cookbook, some from Galileo Galilei or other scientists and inventors, for this millennium.