Antarctica, the ice-covered hunk of land covering our South Pole, is a great topic for an exhibition. It’s a place people know enough about for it not to require a huge selling job, but little enough about for there to be plenty of stories and unknown facts about it to tell. Plus, it’s a subject small enough to be able to do justice to within an exhibition. There is, however, slightly more to Antarctica than just penguins and ice, as the exhibition reveals.

Replacing Dino Jaws, Ice Station Antarctica is the second in the Natural History Museum’s line of family exhibitions using a ticket-based system encouraging children to complete various interactive tasks and challenges. It’s a formula that seems to work well, with the kids given a focus for all their energy, and the parents either competing with or helping their children. Where in Dino Jaws you had to correctly identify a dinosaur (from a selection of four) from various clues given to you on completing each task, here the angle is that you’re an ‘ice cadet’, training to qualify as an ‘ice graduate’ in order to work in an Antarctic ice station. Upon graduation, you’re even given a quick computer-based careers questionnaire, which assigns you to one of a few different Antarctic-based roles.

If the marketing spin for the exhibition is to ‘experience it for yourself’, then the money-moment comes right at the beginning. After a short video introduction by Sanjit, your ‘Ice Commander’, you’re led right into a freezer room, where the temperature is an Antarctican minus 10 degrees. There’s a bypass option available for the hesitant of course, but miss this and you’ve missed the star attraction. Yep, it may just be a cold room with nothing except a big ice cube in it, but gosh, it’s very cold. A member of staff advises you spend no more than a minute in there, and information printed on the walls explain what would happen to your body if you spent much longer in those temperatures (shivering, heart rate slowing, death, if you’re interested). A few seconds and you soon get the point, made all the more apparent by instant goose pimples and nipple pertness.

Having recovered from the cold, the next room shows you the kinds of clothes you’d have to wear in the Antarctic to combat the extreme temperatures. There are enormous thick jackets to try on, with a mirror helpfully provided to let you see just how ridiculous you look. You’re almost tempted to walk back into the cold to test just how well they work. Like the freezer room, trying on the clothing is a simple pleasure, a fairly basic form of interactivity, but it’s inherently social, and feels more ‘real’ than some of the computer-based exhibits further on in the exhibition.

A section on animal life in Antarctica feels more like regular Natural History Museum territory. There’s videos showing albatrosses, seals, and lots and lots of penguins. In fact, there seem to be more penguins than anything else, with a key Antarctic research job being to count and monitor penguin populations. To give you the sense of one of the hazards of this role, an exhibit shows you, and lets you sniff, a beaker of penguin vomit. In case you didn’t guess, it’s pretty grim.

Other sections of the exhibition look at the other tasks that Antarctic scientists carry out. Scuba diving in Antarctic waters sounds pretty chilling, but thankfully the exhibit that lets you try this out doesn’t contain real water. Instead, a giant projected screen shows four virtual divers swimming past fish and underwater plant life. Via a slightly unintuitive hand-waving sensor, you get to control a diver for as long as his airtank lasts, directing a head-mounted lamp to pin-point ‘interesting’ objects. As a game it’s engaging enough once you get the hang of it, especially as you can play alongside your friends, but that’s more down to the novelty of the interface and the graphics than anything else.

A more easily-understandable game comes around the corner in the form of snowmobile driving. There’s a real snowmobile on display, but reproduced at four computer terminals are four snowmobile handlebars, complete with accelerator grip and brake lever. The game (again arbitrarily limited for the purposes of keeping dwell time down, this time by a short supply of petrol), involves driving around the snow in search of meteorites (a real example of which is also on display). In case you don’t figure it out, the meteorites look like black rocks, and are collected simply by driving over them. Once you figure out that you’re all playing in the same ‘arena’ though, it soon becomes more fun to try and chase your friends around and to fly off the cliff into the sea. It’s good, social fun, and is something you couldn’t easily replicate on a computer game at home.

A couple of the other ‘challenges’ aren’t so engaging. A select-the-right-clothing game is a bit close to dressing up paper doll, and an desktop-style computer asking you to correctly respond to an e-mail by choosing from possible replies A, B or C is an exercise in triviality which seems like it’s there as a last-minute replacement for an exhibit that failed to materialise.

Whilst parts of the exhibition feel a little sparse, there are some nice touches dotted about. Small display boards dotted about offer suggestions for quick activities to keep young children engaged, presumably for when the exhibition is busy enough to require queuing for some of the exhibits. Another amusing feature is that in one of the replica makeshift huts, the lights periodically cut out, requiring someone to hit a big button marked ‘emergency’ in order to start a pretend backup generator. As a simple way of demonstrating one hazard of Antarctic life, it’s remarkably effective, and can even encourage strangers to talk to each other in order to figure out what to do - a form of social engagement that’s hard to achieve in museum exhibitions.

Whilst the exhibition is clearly geared towards children, there are some more contemplative exhibits that will appeal more to adults with longer attention spans, such as a beautiful video of a dark Antarctic night sky filled with an aurora australis lightshow.

As an exhibition, Ice Station Antarctica does succeed in letting you experience a feel of life on the South Pole, giving you something extra that you couldn’t get in a book or by reading the Wikipedia article. It’s also a worthwhile family activity, though might not last as long as you’d hope. And if it teaches you nothing else, you’ll always remember the smell of penguin vomit.

Ice Station Antarctica is on at the Natural History Museum in London until 20 April 2008. Admission charges apply.