I told you we’ve been pretty busy this week! Not only have we been to the Blank Park Zoo, Stone State Park and Dorothy Pecaut Nature Center, and the Scarecrow Farm but we ALSO visited the Science Center of Iowa in Des Moines. Although it was fairly small I was impressed at how kid-friendly and well done this science center way! The exhibits were just perfect! Kid-friendly, incredibly hands-on and interactive enough that you can easily spend at least a few hours there. Not to mention that they also have educational demonstrations going on throughout the day! We went to one with dry ice and liquid nitrogen experiments that was of course a huge “wow” factor for the kids! We didn’t get to explore quite everything but I know there is also an IMAX there as well.
I loved this huge “pin” wall where you could press your body up against it to form your own creation!
There was also an entire “Bubble Bay” section – check out those HUGE containers of bubbles!! It was really neat and there were plenty of different type of bubble wands to try out!
This wing of the science museum was really neat. There was a cave to crawl through, rubbings to create, plenty of live animals to see (snakes, frogs, fish, etc.) as well as an area where kids could create their own “news” station which actually played live on the local news station every day!
Where we spent most of our time was in the building area. My son & I built our own LEGO cars to race together. I was pretty impressed that his car beat mine every time!
Then I had never seen the next thing we did before -it was SO cool! They had these big fake eggs in a box that you were supposed to wrap up with scraps of foam strips and straps to hold it together. Once you think your egg was padded enough you put it on the gigantic TALL conveyor belt shown below which would carry your packaged “egg” to the top near the ceiling then drop it down to the floor. The point of course was to ensure that after the “egg” dropped it was still neatly packaged.
I thought this was a FANTASTIC hands-on learning opportunity for my son who is just 5 years old. He was able to experiment with different ways to wrap his “egg” and make predictions on what he thought would happen to his egg based on how he wrapped it. We must have sent 10 eggs up neatly wrapped before he moved on to another area.
Also on the back wall was this awesome “Ball Wall”. I wish I had taken a video for you to see but you put the balls in the yellow cone-shaped baskets. The air would suck the balls through the tubs, across the wall and they would shoot out in different areas. So so incredibly fun! We were on a bit of a time crunch when we visited the museum but there were also areas to build bridges, create electricity from water flow, shoot little cannons, etc. that we didn’t get a chance to do. Overall it was a neat science museum. The exhibits were well planned and well thought out. I’m glad we have a membership there now and am looking forward to going back for another visit!
