Carasso Science Park

The story

Carasso Science Park is a science museum spread over seventeen dunams on the Gustav Levan campus, on the museum boulevard at the edge of the Old City, beside Beit Yatziv and the Ma'of school. It was established by the Rashi Foundation, the Beersheba municipality and the Ministry of Education, in cooperation with Mifal HaPayis and the Carasso family, and opened to the general public in a ceremony held on 30 June 2013 in the presence of the President of the State Shimon Peres. What makes the place special is not only what is inside it but what it occupies: the compound holds buildings from the Ottoman period, from the period of the British Mandate and from the period of the state, and some of the display halls are housed in the building of the School for Bedouin Children, which was built in 1914 and has stood here a hundred years before the exhibitions. That is, genetics and semiconductors are displayed in rooms that were built in order to teach the children of tribes agriculture. The park has about ten interactive exhibitions: light and the sense of sight, sound and hearing, energy, communication, the code of life in molecular biology and genetics, the nucleus of science created in cooperation with the Nuclear Research Center and simulating a reactor, the world of a chip on Israeli high tech and semiconductors, plant protection on the global food challenge, and a separate area for toddlers. In the courtyard outdoor displays are scattered that teach physical principles through the body — a lever, a magnetic pendulum, sound dishes, a rocket engine — and a garden of science games. A Fab Lab also operates at the place with about fifteen three-dimensional printers. In 2020 a large pipe organ built by Gideon Shamir, which had stood in the house of the composer Ami Maayani, was donated to the museum.

• Education
• Museums
• Beersheba