Kinsmen Discovery Centre May 2026

On June 1, 2008—almost two decades to the day after it opened—the Kinsmen Discovery Centre reopened. Leo cut the ribbon with a pair of rusty bolt cutters from the Tinkering Loft. He was 71. He didn’t make a speech. He just walked to the Whisper Dishes, leaned into one, and whispered, “Thank you.”

The Centre thrived for a decade. School buses arrived from Regina, Edmonton, even Winnipeg. It became a rite of passage: you weren’t a true Saskatoon kid until you’d yelled into the Whisper Dishes.

Part One: The Seed of an Idea

But the heart of the Centre was the , a dusty, glorious mezzanine filled with gears, pulleys, levers, and bins of mismatched screws. There were no instructions. Only problems. “Make this pulley lift a bucket of sand.” “Connect these three gears so the last one spins backward.” The floor was always gritty. The air smelled of machine oil and wonder.

The Kinsmen Discovery Centre is not just a place. It is a verb. It is an act of faith in the messy, loud, glorious process of asking, “What if?” And it remains, after all these years, the place where secrets speak and wonder has the final word. kinsmen discovery centre

But in 2004, the first cracks appeared. The roof of the old warehouse began to leak—first a drip, then a stream. The periscope’s mirrors tarnished. Three of the five Bernoulli Blowers broke beyond repair. A corporate donor pulled out, calling the Centre “a quaint, analog relic in a digital age.” Kids had iPods now. They had video games. Why drive across town to push a lever when you could push a button on a screen?

“Go ahead. Touch it.”

The main hall, called the Curiosity Floor , was a chaos of joyful noise. At the , kids suspended beach balls in columns of air, learning that speed and pressure were friends, not foes. The Gravity Well —a deep, funnel-shaped pit—swallowed marbles that spiraled inward, teaching orbits not through equations but through the hypnotic clatter of steel against steel.