Inventorium 1.0

Education and Programming, Exhibition Development

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of our Confederation, Canada geared up for celebrations. At the Ontario Science Centre, this celebration took the form of the Inventorium 1.0, an hands-on learning space featuring 3D printers, a chance to try out VR headsets and a station for visitors to build kinetic structures.

I was brought into this project as an employee of STEAMLabs, a Toronto makerspace. With my background in various rapid prototyping techniques, my coworkers and I were tasked with giving visitors a taste of the makerspace experience. Whether explaining and demonstrating how a 3D printer works or rapidly transforming visitors’ drawings into laser-cut creations, this work pushed me to learn new technological skills and figure out how to easily explain them every day.

I was also responsible for refining the visitor exhibit and laser cutting activity experience. Starting off in paper and pen, I prototyped signage then passed it on to the OSC’s Graphic Design team.

An extraordinary project a coworker and I worked on was Auditory Solar Eclipse Device. Leading up to the 2017 solar eclipse, we were tasked with creating a device that would play the changing eclipse light levels back as changes in audio tempo. This would allow visitors to experience the solar eclipse with or without sunglasses. Working together, we used an Arduino Uno, light sensors and speaker and wrote a program that detected changing light levels and translated it into changes in tempo. We created a secure acrylic case on the laser cutter to hold the completed device. On the day of the eclipse, the OSC Audio Team patched the device into their loudspeakers, and the crowds were able to experience the solar eclipse as never before.