The completely redesigned ScienceWorks at The Children’s Museum exhibit is really impressive. My family was given a sneak-peak the other night. Here are a few of our favorite parts.
The first thing you see when you enter ScienceWorks is the Water Table. Our kids grabbed boats and navigated them from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, learning about locks and dams along the way.
They also created hydroelectric power by opening up dams causing turbines to turn, lighting up nearby buildings along the river.
Just beyond the water table, tucked in a corner of the exhibit is the STEMLab. Created in partnership with Dow AgroSciences, the StemLab is full of so many amazing things, a family could spend hours in this room alone.
In the StemLab, our kids were led through a step-by-step process of making cheese.
They also really enjoyed using the microscopes to look at a variety of rocks, animal skins, coins and other interesting objects. And don’t worry, the microscopes are kid-friendly. Kids can manhandle the microscopes without a parent’s fear of having to spend a small fortune replacing one.
After dragging my kids out of the StemLab, we went to the agricultural area where we learned about food, and how it’s grown in the Midwest. In this part of the exhibit, kids played interactive computer games keeping bugs off of crops, drove toy tractors, simulated driving a combine through a cornfield and learned why tomatoes end up rotten. It was a really interesting look at the food we eat, BEFORE it’s on the shelves at the grocery store.
Our last stop at the ScienceWorks exhibit, and my kids’ favorite, was The Hillside. They spent a majority of the time scaling the wall, climbing from one side to the next, then going back and doing it all over again.
In an hour and a half, that’s as far as we made it into the new exhibit. We ran out of time before we could play and learn in the Pond area (with real amphibians), or before we could create a forecast in the Weather Center, or explore the Geology Labs and the Caves. There’s always next time, I suppose.
The new ScienceWorks exhibit could stand alone as its own museum. There’s so much to do, to see and to learn. I definitely recommend making a special trip to The Children’s Museum to check all this out. Once you go, I’d love to hear your favorite parts of ScienceWorks The Children’s Museum.
See you at The Museum!
-Pete
