Science Centers and Operations in Turkey

Author: Ece Özdoğan Özbal

As steadily increasing awareness of science education importance, the researches about the centers in which science education is carried are fastened. Alternative learning platforms for science education are brought up and the number of the places in which science education is performed like science museums, interactive science centers, and field study centers increased over last 20 years. In particularly, science centers and science museums assume a great role in performing science education and, likewise science centers seem to have strong connections with universities, research centers and other institutions which are related to science. It could be claimed that science centers are ones of those learning platforms which have sufficient equipment for science learning. Instructor and teaching programs carry importance in addition to physical environment which is maintained for science education. Instructors may sometime remain incapable of responding to students’ intriguing and exciting questions because of the fact that instructors who are responsible of science fields in schools are not able to have enough details for the related science field, not able to follow recent researches which have been carried out for the related field, not able to give applied answers for the questions in different difficulty levels, moreover instructors may have difficulty on resource usage. Furthermore, created teaching programs are not able to excite students’ attention and may remain insufficient to meet their questions. The need of getting education in the centers which have sufficient equipment from the experts who got specialized in the related science field arose in order to remove the misunderstandings, shortcomings and flaws in science education. In recent years, science education has been tried to be performed in science centers as one of the alternative learning platforms. In the concept of this study, the creation and operations of Feza Gursey Science Center, Sisli Municipality Science Center, ITU Science Center, Eskisehir Science Experiment Center, Karsiyaka Municipality Science Museum, Gaziantep Planetarium and Science Center, Bursa Science and Technology Center, Konya Science Center, Kocaeli Science Center, Polatli Municipality Science Center will be analyzed.