<Muzeum Techmania v Plzni> will expand its exhibition space for 600 million

Pilsen - At the beginning of next year, the Techmania Science Center museum in Pilsen, focused on popularizing science, is set to start a major reconstruction and significant expansion of exhibition space. By 2014, the exhibition space indoors will increase from the current 3,000 square meters to four times that size. The exhibition will spread throughout the current hall, and in the neighboring historically protected building ASAP, a new state-of-the-art planetarium will be opened by autumn 2013, said the museum's director, Vlastimil Volák, to ČTK.
The museum is set to receive 600 million crowns to complete the project from the Operational Program for Research and Development for Innovation. The project has already been selected, and the Ministry of Education is expected to issue a decision on its financing on December 15, Volák noted.
Techmania has been operating for three years and its annual attendance is over 70,000 people. It offers exhibitions focused on popularizing science, physical phenomena, and showcases reconstructed historical locomotives, a steam engine, and other exhibits. After the expansion of the area, nine new exhibitions are to be created with ambitions for an annual attendance in the hundreds of thousands.
"In part, we will expand our exhibitions, which will be aimed at additional target groups that we have not been able to cover until now - mainly small children, primary school first grades, and families with children. We will particularly expand the offerings for school groups," the director listed. Schools will utilize equipped laboratories, which they usually cannot afford themselves. Techmania lecturers will be able to demonstrate experiments due to regular practice that teachers might encounter only once a year.
The planetarium will also be unique with modern technology. "At this moment, there are only two installations of this device in Europe. It is a device that allows projecting a 3D image onto a spherical surface," Volák explained. Astronomical programs and other educational topics - the human body, underwater world, and more can be projected, allowing the audience to be right in the center of the action due to the curved projection surface and 3D technology.