A COVID-friendly Halloween at Science East

FREDERICTON – Science East in downtown Fredericton had a three-day Halloween event with pumpkins, ghosts, costumes and science experiments. The more hands-on Halloween experiments were closed this year due to COVID-19.

“Our decorations, the ones that were very hands-on, we had to omit this year,” Kaitlyn Tuff, communications officer at Science East, said.

The event was named “safe and spooky Halloween science” this year to encourage social distancing while inside.

One of the closed exhibits included the rock-climbing area.

Science East is located in a former Victorian-era prison built in 1842. The basement of the building is prison history and history of incarceration. It has information on the former prison sections like the segregation cells used for time outs for prisoners and the point of no return. The point of no return is the steps leading to the execution room where prisoners would walk on execution day knowing there was no going back from there.

The basement is also home to famous prisoner signs, a prison timeline and a whodunnit mystery game.

The centre’s fall opening hours are Thursday to Sunday from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m. Admission is $10 for adults and $6.50 for students and youth.

COVID-19 changed the way businesses operate, this includes Science East. Community face masks are required at all times inside Science East. Most of the exhibits still required touching, but there was hand-sanitizer in each room for visitors to use before touching the experiments.

“We’ve already prepared everything for COVID to make sure we have interesting and exciting exhibits, but at the same time, things that don’t necessarily encourage you to touch everything,” said Tuff.

Tuff said in a normal year, the centre puts on a large haunted tour with plenty of Halloween experiments. But this year, they stretched the event over three days where kids and their families could come in costume and use what exhibits were still able to exist.

Some of the exhibits still up at Science East include Tuff’s favourite, the Jacob’s Ladder. The Jacob’s Ladder is when two conductors, in this case wires, have voltage applied between them. Electrons on the positive side want to go to the negative side creating the reaction.

Another exhibit is called Newton’s Cradle. It is a demonstration of momentum, mass times speed. When two objects collide, the momentum of the objects before the collision is the same as the momentum after the collision.
The first floor also includes an exhibit with rocks and minerals from the Quartermain Earth Science Centre.

Leading up to the Halloween days, Science East held activities like pumpkin investigations which made use of their outdoor space as well.

Although Tuff said things look different this year, she said her job as communications officer is exciting.

“It’s been a lot of fun going in here and seeing what things need to be changed or updated,” she said.

“It’s been an exciting time.”