Powerhouse Museum

Spent the day at the Powerhouse Museum.  In honor of the school holiday (Sydney’s winter break, which begins today and lasts for two weeks), the kids were each handed a gift bag upon entering containing toothpaste samples, a notepad, an experiment and some pamphlets.  They were so excited – even children love a goody bag filled with random free stuff they’ll never actually use.  And then…

Exhibits – space, transportation, senses, electricity, radiation, etc.

Experiments – museum attendants manned booths where kids could do mini-experiments

Drawing at the art center

The Magic Garden kids’ play space to climb around on

Lunch – outdoor/indoor café

Outdoor playground in the courtyard

Constructing our own building with tubes and sponges

Story time about a child architect… “Iggy Peck, Architect”

We stayed all day – we literally had a weeks’ worth of activities condensed into one day!

Okay this exhibit is suitably sciencey...

 How astronauts sleep.

  

 The inside of this cylinder was plexiglass and you stand on the bridge as the space capsule rotates around you.  It's supposed to give you the sensation of weightlessness; I wouldn't go that far, but it did mess with your brain and make you feel like you were moving! 

 Mademoiselle Curie -- Julia loved the experiments.

Best exhibit ever:  the chocolate learning machine.  You press one of four cocoa bean characters on the computer screen and he/she tells you a little about how they get turned into that product that brings such exquisite joy into our lives and makes PMS endurable (not exactly how they put it), and then you get to press the screen again and they drop chocolate chips down the tube into your waiting palm.  Since there was no one behind us, we stood there like Pavlovian rats and sat through four 4-minute presentations to try four different types of chocolate.  Brilliant.

A real electric chair – hmm, would not have been my choice to include at a children’s museum, even if there are lots of good lessons to learn about electricity with it.  Julia asked if she could sit on it, and I quickly redirected her.  While I was looking away, Graham hopped on and called out to me, “Mommy, can you do da buckle?” holding the seatbelt strap up.  Ugh.

Julia and Graham are playing a game behind the screen while their image gets

projected on the front.

They had cool space-age playground equipment that employed physics principles;
e.g., on this one, just by leaning you kept it going round and around.