Over the past 31 years Techniquest has made it its mission to make science accessible nationwide.

The Cardiff Bay-based charity has worked continuously to provide educational science-based learning, through innovative exhibits, workshops and activities, which are suitable for visitors of all ages.

Its success is thanks to Techniquest’s ability to recognise that it needs to become a more participatory, and inclusive, science and discovery centre.

A participatory science centre means focussing on providing an engaging experience which reaches a wider range of visitors, ensuring that STEM learning is more accessible within local communities.

Techniquest has been working to develop this principle at its discovery centre since 1986. Its initial focus was based around a discovery learning technique, and experiential learning, which was championed in the initial stages. However, as its audience has continued to evolve, so too has its approach, with Techniquest recognising the need to transform itself into a more interactive experience.

In recent years the educational charity has increasingly tried to incorporate a more participatory, and inclusive, ethos with an emphasis on widening its audience reach throughout the local community.

As a charity it recognised the need to meet the changing and wide-ranging needs of its visitors, firstly to ensure it can remain engaging and relevant, but secondly to ensure it can keep delivering leading scientific education which inspires learning.

In a bid to provide this the centre has built up a range of over 120 diverse exhibits which excite and intrigue children and parents alike, while drawing on different aspects of STEM learning.

In a bid to constantly refresh its offering and continue gaging the interest of the public, Techniquest also invested nearly £100,000 in seven new exhibits last year, including the Lego Soyuz space capsule, the Virtual Reality changing room, Animate It, and Imagination Playground.

Alongside its exhibits, it also features a state-of-the art Planetarium which screens a range of educational shows, and houses a purpose-built science theatre, which features engaging experimental events.

With these wide-ranging attractions, Techniquest is working towards retaining its existing visitors, but also attracting new audiences. It is now reaching out to residents from local communities, to ensure they are involved in new developments and opportunities to participate and interact within the centre.

This work is supported by an interactive educational outreach programme appealing to hundreds of schools and communities across Wales.

Through this initiative, which is linked to both the National Curriculum for Wales and the STEM agenda, Techniquest has engaged with over 96,000 Welsh children, and almost 3,000 schools across the English border in this year alone.

Alongside this it has also recognised the need to become more accessible to its visitors online. As part of this Techniquest has been working to enhance its online offering by developing a web-based learning platform called Look Closer.

This aims to provide a supplementary layer of interpretation to existing exhibits and enable individuals to access further information about each.

Linda Burbage, Business Services Director, said: