Beam into the Star Trek Academy at TELUS Spark

From now until June 4th, you can put your skills to the test and immerse yourself in the world of Star Trek, which is what my daughters and I recently did at TELUS Spark in Calgary. It’s important to note that when you beam into the Star Trek Academy Experience at TELUS Spark, you needn’t be a super-fan or completely knowledgable as a trekkie. While I’m familiar of course, my daughters had no prior experience with Star Trek at all and they had a complete blast taking on this limited time exhibit.

The Star Trek Academy Experience exhibit at TELUS Spark is beyond what I expected, thanks to interactive stations which completely amused us all at every turn. To start each attendee is given a bracelet which are coded with your information, allowing you to operate various stations throughout the exhibit. Right off the bat, these bracelets impressed by kids and before we even walked in I heard a ‘this is so cool!‘ from my 8 year old beside me.

While it’s fantastic that there are actual costumes and props from Star Trek within the exhibit, the exhibit is set up to be a completely immersive experience educating attendees on each aspect of being in Starfleet Academy. Each of the seven zones has interactive games and tests to assess your knowledge and skills to discover what your true proficiency might be. By the end, it will be determined how each attendee can best serve Starfleet – whether it be in engineering, navigation, tactical, science, medical, communications or command.

As you progress through the training program and complete each zone, your results are tracked via your bracelet to determine your Starfleet career recommendation. The girls loved the medical zone {I might have some doctors in the family soon!}, where they assessed injuries and learned about treatments.

Of course the transporter station was a massive hit with all of us, you are actually hologrammed and transported. We had fun acting the role in this booth, seeing who could capture the best transporter photo in the group.

We all had a turn with the phaser challenge, yet unfortunately I cannot boast too much about this since I unfortunately wasn’t the high scorer among us. Sigh. Tactical is fun, yet perhaps that’s not my expertise. Neither is speaking Klingon unfortunately.

At the end of the exhibit, you do give the bracelets back, yet you can have your training information emailed to you, along with photos from some of the stations which are a great keepsake.

As you can see trekkies and newbies alike will find fun and knowledge in Star Trek: The Starfleet Academy Experience exhibit at TELUS Spark. It brought me back to the time when I watched The Next Generation, and my kids who are completely unfamiliar – now have a new interest. We had a lot of fun and laughs together, learned skills and also learned a little about ourselves {again, a tactical career may not be my thing}.

This exhibit is a wonderful way to explore a genre, technology and combining them to test your abilities as well. It’s a showcase of interest, science, innovation and technology – all wrapped up into an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.

Beam into Calgary before June and set course for the “Star Trek: The Starfleet Academy Experience” exhibit at TELUS Spark – it’s such a great family event that you won’t want to miss! Make sure to take advantage of this admission savings too!

 

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Tourism Calgary. The opinions and text are all mine.