The Scottish Maritime Museum holds an important; nationally recognised and varied collection of historic ships, artefacts, shipbuilding machinery, machine tools, small vessels, canoes, lifeboats and other fascinating personal items. The Scottish Maritime Museum also has an ambitious three year programme to create an art collection of national significance.
This growing art collection, which includes works by George Wyllie, Francis Cadell, Benno Schotz and Tom McKendrick, brings an exciting new dimension to the Museum’s nationally recognised collection of maritime heritage.
Scottish Maritime Museum
Play & Learn
Learning through play is a key feature of our museums. We invite you to explore our play and learn activites online - and hopefully in person!
Scottish Maritime Museum
Irvine
Cargo Game
Move as many of the blocks from the loading area onto the ship, without the ship sinking below the surface of the water.
Scottish Maritime Museum
Irvine
Dingy Challenge
Interactive game where you must carefully steer the dinghy around the course. Watch you don't get seasick, the floor moves!
Scottish Maritime Museum
Irvine
Don’t Drop a Red Hot Rivet!
In our Irvine Linthouse Building, put on the welders mask, the riveter’s bunnet and pick up the riveting gun. Now, imagine holding it for 8 hours every day! Try and place the rivets into the slots using the gloves provided. Not as easy as it looks.
Scottish Maritime Museum
Irvine
Kids Interactive Play Area
In our Irvine Linthouse Building, there's a pirate ship where children can use items from the dressing-up box and become pirates, or for smaller children, there is a ballpool. Also close by is a boating pond who will interest all of us who are young at heart. You can use one of the readymade foam boats or purchase one to make yourself.
Scottish Maritime Museum
Irvine
Puffer Challenge
Interactive game, where children can build their own puffer by selecting various options. At the end of the game, the puffer will steam across the screen, and give a score out of 10. Can you build the Puffer so that it sails from one end of the screen to the other?
Scottish Maritime Museum
Dumbarton
Smoothing and carving a real wax hull model
On our Dumbarton Scraping Platform, kids love getting involved in this practice of physically scraping the excess wax from the model hull and to shape it, thus making it more streamlined for the water. Exactly as what would have happened many years ago.
Scottish Maritime Museum
Dumbarton
Test hull designs
Water + children = fun! In our Dumbarton Propellor Workshop, test different hull designs in our mini experiment tank with its own wave making machine. Children can watch their boat progress down the tank with the help of the wave machine.
