At-Bristol Science Centre
Bristol, United Kingdom

At-Bristol is an award winning science and discovery centre based in Bristol, UK. Since opening in July 2000 as a Landmark Millennium Project, At-Bristol has had over 2 million visitors. Currently, visitor numbers are 550,000/year including 140,000 School visits. At-Bristol has two major exhibition attractions. The first is Explore At-Bristol, a hands on science centre with a planetarium and exhibition galleries covering the brain and body; inventions, innovation and engineering; and natural physical phenomena. A new Live Science arena focusing on contemporary science and its impact on society has opened in 2005. The second exhibition is Wildwalk At-Bristol, a journey through life on Earth including a living rainforest. Wildwalk is a unique combination of living plants and animals and state-of-the-art sound and vision technologies.

Both exhibitions utilize a range of media to achieve At-Bristol's mission of making science more accessible to all. This includes a mix of traditional exhibitions and events as well as interpretation using new technologies such touch screen interactive exhibits, digital Animations, video on demand, web casts, video conferencing and web-based tools. Explainers and presenters are key to delivering our programmes and animating the exhibitions.

At-Bristol Science Centre disposes of extensive education suites including a TV studio, two laboratories, an ICT suite and classrooms and its Exhibitions and Programmes teams include 25 people dedicated to engaging visitors in active learning and dialogue about science in society.

At-Bristol has participated in several European collaborations including BIONET, a web-based project to inform European citizens about new discoveries in life sciences and give them an opportunity to give their opinions about the socio-ethical issues arising from applications of the science. At-Bristol is also a partner in a Minerva project (Socrates) on Open Learning via Information Technology.

At-Bristol is a partner of the consortium that run the Bristol’s Master in Science Communication (University of West of England, University of Bristol and At-Bristol). The Master is involved in the Dotik project. Trough the Bristol’s Master and science centre Dotik will strictly collaborate also with the “Meet the Scientist” programme: ECSITE UK (network of science and discovery centres) run a Meet the Scientist programme, supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Explainers act as facilitators to dialogue between scientists and visitors to science centres. The Master course leaders have trained scientists and science centre staff to run such events and At-Bristol was one of the first centres to pilot the programme.