Raymond Moriyama rides the escalator down towards the floor of the forested valley that’s as much a part of the Ontario Science Centre’s architecture as its glass and concrete shell.

“You don’t see many science centres like this,” says the retired architect, who designed the place more than half a century ago.

And in its cascading embrace of the surrounding nature — the wooded Don River ravine brushes up against banks of windows that line the long escalator shaft — that’s almost certainly true.

But in the Confucian teaching philosophy Moriyama built into the place, which opened 50 years ago Thursday, it has been emulated by nearly 3,000 subsequent science centres across the globe.

Moriayama explains that Confucius said ‘When you hear, you forget; when you see, you remember some; but when you touch and do, it becomes part of you.’ ”

And in the five decades since the centre opened Sept. 26, 1969, at Don Mills Road and Eglinton, that hands-on learning mode has taught some 53 million visitors — children, teachers, parents — about the science and technology that’s become an ever more crucial element of human civilization.

One of its earliest guests was former astronaut Chris Hadfield, who credits his first trip to the fledgling centre as a 10-year-old as one of the starting points for his later journeys into the heavens.

“It was in the fall of ’69, right after the moon landing and I was hugely influenced by that of course,” Hadfield says, referring to the Apollo 11 mission in July of that year. “And amazingly enough … by fall they had an actual piece of the moon there.”

The sight of that lumpy rock sent Hadfield’s spirits flying, he says. But the whole interactive concept of the place was a thrill for the future space star.

“Seeing that piece of the moon, that direct, suddenly palpable link with what I’d seen on TV and what I’d been imagining, and having that brought home” was inspiring, he says. “And you couldn’t touch it of course … but there where so many other things there you could touch and I just found the place what I thought all schools should be: inspiring, interactive, memorable, exciting.”

As Moriyama had hoped, that interactive concept has been an abiding and winning approach for the centre and has laid down guiding memories for countless kids, says Maurice Bitran, its current CEO and chief science officer.

“Interactivity has been the hallmark of the Ontario Science Centre and it also sparked a movement that now has thousands of more science centres around the world,” Bitran says.

Indeed, the newest centre exhibit, opened this week, is extending that hands-on tradition by offering visitors an interactive look at the workings of the human mind.

“It will look at how people’s own minds work,” says Bitran, “how we perceive what we perceive, how we think and make decisions. There is a lot of research on behaviour, how we make decisions and our consciousness, and this will be a very experiential way of getting at that.”

Bitran says the exhibit’s opening was timed for the international science centre conference he hosted earlier this week.

That Association of Science-Technology Centres assembled representatives from about 50 countries and 1,800 centres, all of which owe a debt to their Ontario forerunner, which started life as this province’s key contribution to Canada’s 1967 centennial celebrations.

At that time it was one of only two such centres on earth, alongside San Francisco, and ridiculed among the curatorial community everywhere, says Moriyama, trim and vital at 89.

“They said it was just Disneyland gimmickry,” he says.

But the idea took, and all subsequent centres followed suit, Bitran says.

A key challenge now for the centre is to remain relevant in the world of bewildering technological and scientific change that such facilities have helped nurture.

“We do need to keep up with the times. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the latest technology, but what does the next generation need to know about science and technology to succeed in the future,” Bitran says. “In that sense we’re always thinking of what’s next, what will people be interested in, so there is an evolution,” he says.

But the centre has also preserved some of the oldies that have stayed popular through three generations.

Indeed, the hair-raising Van de Graaff generator — the “Mona Lisa” of the centre’s exhibits — was recently moved to a more prominent place across the upper bridge from the front entrance.

Likewise, mainstays such as the slanted house that makes you larger in the mounted television screen as you walk through it still host lineups of schoolchildren in the centre’s Science Arcade.

And the nearby tornado-generating cloud machine still blows young minds, Bitran says.

Today, however, the centre’s new offerings are rarely thrust fully formed on the visiting public, Bitran says.

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Instead, Bitran says, the centre has set up a consultation process that formally seeks public input into many exhibit changes. For example, the new mind exhibit, set up in the Great Hall, offered the public a dozen topics for inclusion before settling on a final lineup.

“We went around and we asked people ‘what do you think about this, what do you think about that’?” Bitran says.

“This has been the result of that dialogue. We’re saying ‘these things are affecting your lives. What are you interested in, and what would you like to hear more about?’ ”

Another innovation the centre is contemplating would be to convert its massive OMNIMAX theatre — which uses analogue film technology — into a part-time planetarium.

“Today there are digital projectors available (that) allow you to project any sort of data set, the hurricane in the Atlantic, the Rover stuff from Mars,” Bitran says. “And here you have a 75-foot (23-metre) dome with 300 seats that could double as a large planetarium.”

All that’s missing, Bitran says, is the $7 million needed for the digital conversion.

One troubling development the centre will help combatis the emergence of a growing science skepticism found in such things the anti-vaccine and climate change denial movements, Bitran says. Indeed, a recent survey by the polling firm Ipsos for the 3M company found some 44 per cent of Canadians polled thought of scientists as elitists. A large number also said they would dismiss scientific findings that did not fit their own beliefs.

“It’s a very worrisome development that some people are turning away from science,” Bitran says. “And institutions like this one can play a role in saying ‘no, science is fun, science is a part of life, actually science is the only hope we have to solve the really big problems we face.”

To help turn the tide, the centre has set up its own STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs and promotes those in outside education systems.

“But we go beyond that because we think that the toolkit for the future is going to be more than just STEM skills,” Bitran says. “It’s going to be things like creativity, innovation, resilience, collaboration, things that go beyond being able to code or solve a math problem.”

The centre’s 50th anniversary tag line — Ask, Test, Repeat — is a distillation of the scientific method that must be the basis for urgent problem-solving, Bitran says.

“It’s the critical thinking that underpins the whole thing,” he says. “And the decision-making approach based on the scientific method is very important because that’s where the critical thinking comes in.”

Ceaseless developments in internet and digital technologies are also posing challenges for the centre, which is engaged in a kind of love-hate relationship with them, Bitran says.

“We have all the knowledge amassed by humanity at your fingertips,” he says. “That’s bigger than the printing press revolution.

“And what are we doing with it? We use it to watch cat videos and worse stuff.”

While such hand-held distractions might offer an addictive alternative to the centre’s hands-on exhibits, Bitran says they also offer opportunity for the facility to move in new directions, with expanded mandates.

“Here there is a (digital) tool with huge potential that we can harness to make learning something very different,” he says. “And I think learning is due for a very major change, but I don’t think that change is going to come from the establishment of teaching because they’re very busy teaching the curriculum.”

Rather, Bitran says, places like the centre — where there is freedom of action for visitors and a fluidity of exhibit potential for the facility — can offer an experimental space for evolving teaching roles.

Hadfield, who visits often and has an exhibit dedicated to him set up at the centre, says the place still holds up in a world where portable screens can bring kids the world in their hands.

“There’s lots of stuff, of course, online now,” he says. “But the ability to go and experience things for real and not just see pictures of them or virtual versions of them, I think, is just as important now as it’s ever been.”

And in the end, Hadfield may have summed the centre up best as it passes into its second half-century.

“It’s a big part of Toronto and it’s a big part of southern Ontario and a big part of my childhood.”

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