A geography camp for children at BITM. A Telegraph picture

Imagine playing volleyball without a ball, in front of a giant screen. How about having a robot read out what you write? Or complicated differentiation and integration problems explained through experiments? These and many more activities will soon become a part of Birla Industrial and Technological Museum (BITM), which is set to expand its bouquet of 12 galleries.

“Science museums need to continuously upgrade themselves so that children keep returning to satiate their interest and not because their parents want them to go on an educational trip,” said E. Islam, the director of BITM.

One of the upcoming galleries is on mathematics, covering 15,000sq ft. The gallery will use various games on multiplication, squaring, cubing, finding the volume of an object, and permutation and combination. Funded by the National Council of Science Museums, the gallery has a budget of Rs 40 lakh and will cater to classes VII to XII.

“We have focused on the school curriculum so that children benefit from each visit, but have retained an element of fun,” said Islam. The gallery will also touch upon the history of mathematics as a discipline, highlighting the Greek, Arabic and Indian contributions to the field.

For students beyond Class X, BITM has conceptualised an electronics and communications gallery, to be spread across 18,000sq ft. The new gallery will replace the existing electronics gallery, which, according to the museum director, has become “out of date”.

The gallery will showcase the revolution in the field of cellular technology and its social impact as well as the significance and applications of the Internet or playing games on a screen.

A science gallery will come up for pre-school kids. Here, children can play with shapes, colours and textures and learn to identify them. “The 9,000sq ft gallery will have a water body and paper for the kids to make boats,” said Islam.

A science shop is also on the anvil, which will stock science kits, Indian maps as jigsaw puzzles and pinhole cameras. While the robot, mathematics gallery and science shop are scheduled to open on BITM’s 51st birthday in May 2010, the electronics and communication gallery and science gallery for pre-school kids are slated for May 2011.