Sovereign Centre in Weston-Super-Mare has turned to ‘edutainment’ as part of its summer season plans to drive footfall and support operators by welcoming the Brainiac Detective Academy Live.
The free, interactive 60-minute hands-on workshop, led by the Brainiacs, provides ‘young detectives’, in their family groups, with an opportunity to use real forensic techniques to discover clues and help solve a mystery.
The initiative is part of the wider Weston Placemaking Strategy, which has the Council-owned Sovereign Centre at its heart. This event follows joint, community-partnered initiatives with organisations such as Weston College, North Somerset Arts and Made in North Somerset.
Centre manager Jon Walton, who led the team as part of the strategy to reposition shopping centres at the heart of their communities, said: “Running events that are genuinely engaging and create a buzz for visitors but also help meet centres’ commercial targets can be a challenge but here we have something really exciting that’s a UK shopping centre first.
“As we bring forward a greater variety of uses and events in the centre to help the high street thrive and generate more footfall, edutainment offers an opportunity to create a destination activity for all the family. We will be measuring its impact carefully as well as thinking about other centres in our portfolio that would benefit.”
The Brainiac Detective Academy Live’s founder Dan Colman said: “We have had a lot of success worldwide over the years but are now looking closer to home and create more family-orientated edutainment events where the aim is to entertain, engage and inform..
“Retail spaces, shopping centres and other town centre venues have huge potential to bridge the gap between traditional retail and new destination-led marketing so we’re really pleased to be coming to the Sovereign Centre over the summer and bringing this thinking to life.”
The events took place run on Thursdays 22 and 29th July, and 5th, with the final event to be held on 12th August.
