Wellington

Top 5 activities
1 Capital E
2 Carter Observatory
3 Te Papa
4 Parliament
5 Wellington Museum of City and Sea

1 Capital E
Capital E was great. It had a TV studio and a media lab, which were both epic. In the medialab I got to create a 3D movie. I will post a video of my movie as soon as I can. The software used was Unity 5 or Unity 3D. Link to the page Capital E Movie Making. The other thing I did There was ONTV. ONTV is a TV studio that has everything a professional studio has- auto cue, green screens, studios A and B, soundproof walls, sound control, director controls and vision mixing. The story we did was "Once Upon a Crime." The details for that are here.

2 Carter Observatory
Carter Observatory had a night sky Planetarium, which was great. In it, I learned about the Google lunar X prize and then had a look at the night sky. Before then, I learnt about Extremophiles in their education center, and had a look around the observatory. They had an old telescope(still in use), a simulator that showed how space travel might work in the future. A fascinating fact I found was that 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the big bang the universe was the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence (I hope I got the amount of zeros right). Their website: right here

3 Te papa
Te papa stood out because it had a virtual reality system, and not just a projector or 360 degree screen either. Their system was a headset like this one:


It had motion sensors, so if you turned around you could see the back of the plane, looked down and saw the bottom of the plane, and had all sorts of lifelike stuff in it. At one point, the plane changed to look like native bush- and then a moa came out of the blue and ran straight past me! I tried to touch it but of course couldn't because it was virtual. Link to te papa :here and the Air New Zealand Exhibition ; here

4 Parliament
Parliament was very interesting to me because it is political, and something that interests me a lot. They let us see "Question Time," which was quite funny. We could see the national MPs, and a lot of questions were from labor asking national about things that the government. Because the prime minister wasn't there, the deputy prime minister answered all the questions. One time we heard one of the whips shout out, "It's question time, not cricket!" I would prefer to watch an hour of that to an hour of cricket!

5 Wellington museum of city and sea.
The reason I liked this so much was that it was about the Wahine disaster most of the time, and we got to do a whole class skit sort of thing, which was very funny, particularly as I was a stowaway! we got to see what the tickets looked like, and got to try on some of the actual life jackets used to get off that ship. Did you know there were over 700 on the ship, but only 50 people died? Links to their site here.

Wellington was a great trip, and totally worth it. It was just great.