Science museum opens maker festival to 40 teams in Daejeon

The science ministry said Monday that the National Science Museum will hold its 2026 Maker Play festival on Oct. 31, turning the museum's grounds in Daejeon into a hands-on workshop where visitors build, test and race their own creations.

The event, held from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Dream Plaza of the museum's main building, is free to enter, though some sales booths will charge. About 40 maker teams — professionals alongside general and student clubs — will run the Maker Play Street booths, showing their work and talking visitors through the trial and error behind it. Displays and hands-on sessions there cover craft, robotics, coding and artificial intelligence. Its theme is "A playground for imaginative people — anyone can be a maker, everyone is a player."

Racing is the centrepiece. In the Make-It Racing competition, visitors will drive miniature cars they have designed and built themselves in a Rolling Bowling Grand Prix, and race sailboats propelled by wind in a windsurfing race. A go-kart and swing-car driving zone offers family building programmes and lets children drive what they have made. A Big 5 Attraction Tour, in which visitors collect stamps by completing booth activities, and an open-mic stage for makers round out the visitor programme.

Performances and partner workshops widen the festival beyond the booths. The Pink Socks theatre company will stage its marionette puppet show, "Carriage Theatre! The Romantic Wandering Troupe," at 3 p.m. in the Science Hall. In the Creative Wing, the 2026 Space AI Habitat Challenge will ask participants to propose ideas for solving problems of living on the moon and Mars using satellites, robots and AI. At the Space Science Park, teams will install weather stations they built themselves in a geodesic dome village competition.

The museum's director, Lee Eun-young, said the faster intelligent automation and autonomous technology advance, the more important creativity and a willingness to take on challenges become.

"I hope that through this Maker Play event, children and families and indeed all citizens will have a meaningful experience of implementing their own ideas and discovering new possibilities through trial and error," she said.

Some programmes require advance reservations or on-site first-come, first-served sign-ups, with details posted on the museum's website.