Today we visited Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Discovery and Science. What a wonderful place. This museum is truly fascinating, there’s so much to see and do and touch and experience. The exhibits are all kid-friendly, interesting and fun.  This place is so worth a visit, actually, it’s totally worth a membership.

We started with the Weather Center downstairs, where we played with hurricane wind blowing machines, a  meteorologist broadcasting station. You actually get to stand in front of a green background and you can see yourself broadcasting on the TV monitor. There are machines that simulate tornadoes, and lightening, and smoke rings.

We then played with the recycling games, AA got to drive the recycling truck and we all could play a sort of board game, only a state-of-the-art intelligent board game where we could get points for recycling materials correctly.  Immediately afterwards, we went upstairs. This floor is so full of fantastic stations for hands-on learning. There’s the human body, the surgeon/medicine sections. There is the making of sounds with instruments, where you actually get to see sound waves traveling through a tube of tiny styrofoam bubbles that lift as the wave passes through them. There is the balancing board –who knew balancing could be so hard!!  There is the pulse/heart station. There is the force/strength machine –arm wrestling anyone?  There is the pulleys station -wow, a 6 year-old can lift a 25 lbs weight with just one hand?! There is the solar system space with all sorts of cool elements about space, such as the Mars Rover ride. There is piloting planes. There is so much more, I can’t write it all because we didn’t get to see it all. We could’ve but were hungry and a tad tired after about 4 hours of fun. We decided to leave some stuff unseen for our next visit.

Two of my personal favorites were the shows –3 of them. A scientist actually conducts really cool experiments: one on electricity, one on states of matter, and one on temperature and sounds.  And my second favorite was the Everglades airboat ride.  We boarded a very realistic airboat to navigate the Everglades. A fantastic virtual reality experience!  The only thing was we all wished it had been longer!

We plan to come back soon and visit the areas of the museum we didn’t get to the first time around.  I’m looking forward to this one. I’m sure the fun will continue 🙂

 

Driving the Recycling Truck

Running through the Solar System

 

 

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