I had signed the girls up for a half day "robotic" workshop at Science Centre last week. It's called Egg-Bot. Below is how this machine looks like.
What the machine does is it enables you to draw nicely on a spherical surface.
The workshop consist of how the machine came about and how freeware called inkscape was used to program it. There were templete patterns which you can call up in files but the girls decided to draw using the mouse on the screen and sent the design to the egg-bot to draw on christmas ornaments, light bulbs and ping pong balls. The calibration of fitting the spherical object onto the machine was quite tricky, according to Feli.
This is how the final product looks like.
Pretty impressive right? The above are image grabs from the workshop's website. The girls' freehand designs were much simpler.
Next, we visited Snow City. Don't laugh, OK, but this is our 1st time there. Feli went there once with the holiday excursion with Tien Hsia when she was in kindergarten so she don't remember much.
If you are member of AA, it's the cheapest deal @ $39 for a family of 4 for a 1h play. We personally felt that the place is small...the brochure made it look like it was very big. No cameras were allowed, so we were shepherded to all the photo-nice stations and photographed by their photographers and given the photos number for our orders. After being ushered around, when we were left alone, we found out there's nothing much to do except go tubing down the slope. The ice-shavings were difficult to compact into snowballs. Since it was christmas, santa claus made an appearance. He looked kinda bored when there was no one else to pose with and gave Bert a scare when he suddenly placed his arms over his shoulders!
Feli and Bert didn't go tobogganing. I went with Tiff twice. The first time was very scary for me. I screamed all the way down as I couldn't control the tube and went down backwards. 2nd time though, I knew what to expect and tried to enjoy the ride down...tried as I was nervous and having 2nd thoughts about going the 2nd time.
The ice was very numbing when it got into the lower part of my calves...it felt like a bad blue-black. It's best to use their boots rather than your own track shoes....it's better protected from the ice shavings that inevitably would enter your shoes as you walk around. Luckily we went for 1h play instead of 2h....we left the place after like 40 minutes? It was cold but mostly because it is boring, if you are not interested in tobogganing...anyway, how many times can you go down the slope anyway?
Currently, Science Centre has 3 mobile exhibitions - CSI, Dino Robots & Zoo Robots. We went for the Zoo Robots. It's very cheap at $1 per pax. Dino is at $2 pax but we didn't have time for the Dino. Also the Zoo Robots was at Omni-Theatre which is just next door to Snow City.
Zoo Robots has huge robot replicas of animals like the rhino, bat, grasshopper, chameleon and playtapus. Some robots are interactive i.e. you can push a button and move a toggle/joystick to make it move it's tongue or see how it's eyes move. It's a very small exhibition. Only about at most 20minutes tops is needed to try out everything. As it's something new, the girls like it.
All in, we had a wonderful time today. That's another family holiday item ticked off in our "Stay in Singapore" hols this year.
Here's the 2 pixs we bought @ package A of $30 for 2 6R photos.
Love
Theresa
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