Proton Fire Crackers and Solar Soup

Why does a bright red car look grey in the dark? Why don’t sunrays get cold on their long journey through space? And how can they be converted to electricity? In the summer of 2010, an exhibit in mondo mio!, the children’s museum in Dortmund, responded to tricky questions about the sun, light, and energy. In tune with the motto, Here Comes the Sun, the boys and girls learned that without the sun there would be no colors, life, wind, and weather.

Between July 15 and August 28, 2010, over 7,000 visitors attended the exhibit and well over half of them were children. The boys and girls played at the energy ticker with the sun to see who could make their solar powered insects chirp first. In the multi-media knowledge box, they found key facts about the central star of our planetary system: Just how big, how old, and how hot is the sun? What is it made of? Furthermore, with the computer animation, proton fire cracker, the children were able to travel to the inside of the sun and let hydrogen atoms collide with each other. In this way they learned about how nuclear fusion works.

A particular goal of the exhibit was to give children more insight into energy use, energy supply, and energy efficiency. In the sun energy lab, the youngsters learned, for instance, how photovoltaics work. And on sunny days, they prepared soup with the help of a solar cooker - made exclusively from solar energy.

To encourage Turkish as well as German families to visit the exhibit, all of the info texts and installations were in both languages. The same applied for the audio stations where professional speakers were telling stories. One of the stories was about polar bears. The light-colored fur of these animals conducts the warming solar energy to the skin where it is absorbed very well because polar bears have black skin.

Here Comes the Sun was a touring exhibit, and after spending six weeks in Dortmund, it travelled to the German capital. It was here that the exhibit was developed by the Institute of Physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the children’s museum in Berlin, Verein Neues Universum. The Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded Here Comes the Sun as an official contribution to the Year of Science 2010, which went by the motto ‘The Future of Energy.’ The RWE Foundation shared the costs of the presentation in mondo mio!, the children’s museum in Dortmund.