Day at the Museum

Last Wednesday DD2, and P & C and I went to the Museum of Science and Industry. We wanted to get in at least one more visit before our membership ended. (We had so much fun we might even try for one more visit!)

Here are P & C making music by jumping on the different colored lights. It was a good way to get rid of some of the excitement energy; there was plenty to go around.



We got tickets for the Mythbusters exhibit, and we were excited about that too. The first room was interesting with a lot of the props from the show. Here is one of their duct tape boats.



The next room is where the fun started. Here you could build a house out of straw, wood or brick. P is using all three materials in his construction.



Here I am pushing the button to unleash the windstorm to see how well your building will hold up. P lost one straw block off the roof; my brick building held up to the wind. You can see right behind me the tally board to register your results.



The next experiment/play area was pulling off a tablecloth from under a set table. P, C, and DD2 all tried. P succeeded in leaving everything but one plate on the table, as did DD2, C couldn't manage quite as much speed and only left one dish on the table. You can see P is pretty smug about his success.



This is the "plane taking off from a conveyor belt" experiment. You could play with the speed of the plane, of the conveyor belt, and of the car on the belt.



Here P and DD2 are flicking cards at a styrofoam disk. The speed on display was achieved by DD2, and wasn't even her best time.



Here you could try to see how long you could hang; I think DD2 and I tied with about 2 or 3 seconds? It's harder than it looks.



There was a live presentation area where they were presenting the possibility of dodging a bullet/paintball. We discovered that we reacted better to a sound cue than a light cue; that it takes less than a second for a bullet to reach a target from 100 feet away, and that some people have a reaction time of less than .5 of a second, so it is possible to dodge a bullet. C and DD2 managed about a .7 reaction time, but P's time was in the .4 range.

Later we went to the weather area. P is always interested in weather. We launched a hot-air balloon, played with electricity/lightning, with some magnetized fluid, launched a magnetic ring about 30 feet in the air, and played with some prisms making rainbows. (I love this picture!)



We also experienced a wind storm in this tube. Check out the hair!



We looked at the chicks, and checked out the train, and had some lunch. Then the kids went to the OmniMax presentation on Born to be Wild, about fostering elephants and orangutans back into the wild, and Marj and I ducked out and went to the Textile Warehouse. It only took 10 minutes to get there and back, with very little traffic, and we had a wonderful time shopping. This is just the cutting table area. We spend all our time in the 5 rooms on the main floor, and didn't even get upstairs or into the basement.



I got dropped back off at the museum, and we left shortly after that to go home, rest a little while and then go to the ice cream social at church.



It was a wonderful day!