Science museum in Gwacheon to mark Hangul Day with braille and starlight

The National Gwacheon Science Museum will hold a special Hangul Day event on Oct. 9, marking the centennial of the holiday's creation and of the proclamation of Hunminjeongeum's braille adaptation with a program of hands-on exhibits and a planetarium writing contest.

Programs are grouped under four themes: reading and writing, making and drawing, exploration, and the museum's own play on words, roughly "something worth seeing at night." A reading room on the second floor of the central hall will offer an October bookshelf of science titles and a mailbox that will hold postcards written on Hangul Day until the first snowfall.

On the first floor, visitors can make keyrings of their own names in braille, draw faces from the shapes of consonants and vowels, and spell Hangul with their bodies alongside Suuki, the museum's mascot. Working with the National Hangeul Museum, the science museum will also present an educational program called "Malang Hangeul," in which participants make their own soft Hangul figures and photograph and share the results, continuing at the Korean Science and Civilization Hall through Dec. 23.

At the Korean Science and Civilization Hall, visitors can join an exhibition-linked mission to find letters hidden around the galleries, completing a crossword from clues about the creation of Hunminjeongeum.

The planetarium will host the night-time writing contest "Moonlight Hundred-Line Poem: A Story Without Stars." Under the artificial night sky, participants will write and read aloud their own stories from science-related prompts. The contest is open to 200 visitors aged 7 and older, born in 2019 or earlier, at a fee of 5,000 won. Registration opens Oct. 2 through a booking link posted on the museum's website.

The museum is also working with the Gwacheon City Family Center to bring in multicultural families living in the city, which it expects to use Hangul as a common ground for families of different languages and cultural backgrounds to express themselves and communicate. Details of the event are available on the museum's website.

Lee Chung-won, director of the National Gwacheon Science Museum, described the script as a communication technology. "Hangul is a technology of communication that has expressed speech in writing, recorded people's thoughts and delivered them to one another," he said, adding that he hoped visitors would meet the principles and value of Hangul anew through the museum's various hands-on programs this Hangul Day.