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Research and education at the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore.

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Sat 10 Mar 2007

Public Gallery Tours during NUS Open House 2007

Category : education

We opened up the Public Gallery for the first time on a Saturday morning. Since it's also the NUS Open House, we stayed open until 6pm. Besides the flurry of advertisements on Habitatnews, WildSingapore, Yesterday.sg and several mailing lists, some visitors were redirected from the department's booth at the Faculty of Science promotion and the Science Library tours.

From 9am to 6pm, Raffles Museum Toddycats entertained and educated the constant stream of visitors, alumni, a group natural resource management graduate students from Mahidol University, Thailand, and members of the public. Everyone learnt a lot and we smiled when we read their feedback comments that asked for a larger natural history museum.

While the guides on duty included some veterans, most were guiding for only the first or second time. Their friendly personalities and eagerness to share stories about nature and the environment made for a enjoyable and educational experience.

Amongst the many visitors were a bunch of NUS biology alumni - their morning at the Raffles Museum's Public Gallery awakened a desire to reconnect with nature in Singapore. The enjoyable thing about that was the fact that the catalyst, in some instances, were our non-biologist volunteers!

Many children came and a different guiding approach was required for them. When I heard them introducing guides to their favourite cartoon characters in between stations, I knew they were well taken care of!

We had some pretty energetic characters at 5pm. In order to allow their parents to concentrate on their guide, we finally sent them on a hunt for the babirusa, and also had them figure out how many snakes there were in gallery.

It worked well, they even learnt names and expressed disbelief about gliding snakes that had us pull out some of Jake Socha's flying snake videos; finally, they finally believed us!

Just before they discovered the 4.4m King Cobra

Figuring out the habitats of mangrove fish

The group from Mahidol University and their Toddycat guide

(Some of the) NUS Biology Alumni!

Thanks to Ivan, Alex, Hock Heng, Nanthini, Oi Yee, Enoka and Gwynne for a great job today, and our sympathies go to Wei Song & Fadly; get well soon, guys!

Posted at 9:34PM SGT by N. Sivasothi | permalink | ,