A human claw machine, maritime drone missions and gel blaster shooting are all part of the second Defence Collective Festival, running 14-15 November 2026 from 10am to 6pm across three Singapore museums: the Singapore Discovery Centre, the Singapore Navy Museum and the Singapore Air Force Museum. Admission is free, and this year's edition follows up on the 2025 debut that coincided with SG60 and SAF60.
The paid option is the Exclusive Passport, a $10 pass sold online or on-site that works at all three venues for the whole weekend and unlocks the premium activities, plus a festival tote bag. Passport holders who rack up stamps can redeem museum-exclusive iron-on patches at the DIY booth, with a different patch at each museum on each day.
Premium activities differ by venue. At the Discovery Centre there's a gel blaster target-shooting lane with targets at varied distances (kids must be accompanied by an adult), plus a riddle trail through the Through The Lens Of Time and Sandbox galleries, where you collect a secret password to exchange with costumed characters — a Samsui woman and a Phua Chu Kang lookalike among them. Two stamps complete the activity; there are four characters to find. At the Navy Museum, Reach & Rescue has you piloting a drone through a maritime course, collecting aid packages and delivering supplies to the right rescue point before time expires. Over at the Air Force Museum, Air Supply Mission turns you into a human claw machine, hoovering up supplies and dropping them where they're needed.
Everything else is free. Visitors can tackle a timed bridge-building challenge, send Morse code messages with a torchlight, and crack codes in a spy-style puzzle race. Younger kids get SDCity at the Discovery Centre, where they dress up as firefighters, paramedics or police officers and patrol a miniature city putting out fires, while Dream City Builder lets them construct a tabletop city brick by brick. There's also a community mural: pick a numbered sticker square at the Discovery Centre concourse, write a pledge about Singapore's future, and slot it into place. Bouncy castles, giant battleship challenges, uniform try-ons, craft workshops and food stalls round out the weekend.
Shuttle buses run on festival days only: hourly from Jurong Point to the Discovery Centre (9.45am-4.45pm outbound), and to the Navy Museum from both Expo MRT Station Exit B (10am-5pm) and Our Tampines Hub (9.30am-4.30pm), with hourly return trips from 10.30am at both. There's no shuttle to the Air Force Museum, so plan your own route there.
Who's this for? Families with primary-school-age kids will get the most out of it — the first responder role-play, city building and bouncy castles are clearly aimed at them — but the drone course, gel blasters and puzzle trails give teenagers and adults plenty to compete over too. Since it's a single weekend and the three museums sit in different corners of the island (Jurong East, Bedok/Changi area), most visitors will realistically manage two venues in a day, so pick your premium activities first and grab the $10 passport early. If you're visiting Singapore in mid-November anyway, it's an unusually good-value, hands-on look at the country's defence story that goes well beyond a typical museum visit.
