Children's Museum

Get your engines running as you use step-by-step instructions to set your car up for a race on a large figure eight track! Who will win pole position?

What is a pulley? A pulley is a simple machine in which a rope is passed over the top of a wheel. You pull down, and the load lifts up. A simple pulley system has one wheel. A compound pulley system has more than one wheel. It changes the direction of your pulling force and makes it easier to lift things. You pull more rope, but with less effort. Remember.. more wheels = easier lifting! 

Helping you see the unseen, the Video Light Microscope will provide guests with the opportunity to experiment with a real tool of science. Various objects under the microscope will be magnified and displayed in brilliant full-color on an LCD monitor.

This station allows children to learn about the human body. After entering a life-like doctor’s waiting room, children can sign in at a typical doctor’s reception desk and enter a doctor’s office. They can weigh themselves, check their height, read an eye chart, learn about nutrition and look through a microscope at representative human cells. The exhibit contains professional models of the human skeleton and heart, among others.

Radiology Associates, a group of local doctors who specialize in such areas as digital catscans, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance-imaging (MRI), has sponsored a child friendly radiology station consisting of eight separate hands-on exhibits. Children are able to enter a dark room lit with black lights where they can manipulate a skeleton, use an ultrasound to find the coratid artery and examine X-rays to look a broken bones on a light box.

Become a master of gravity and make your own roller coaster by assembling crazy curves and deep dips while trying to keep a ball on the track. The never ending possibilities are only limited by your imagination! At this exhibit you will learn what it takes to make a real roller coaster.

Using arches, squares, rectangles, and triangles guests are challenged to build the highest structures that they can. This exhibit is challenging and only limited by your ideas and shaky hands. Don’t let it fall!

A small house has been created in “cut-away”, which allows children to examine the inner construction of a typical building. Wiring, sheetrock, framing, insulation, and duct work are exposed so that children can see how a building is put together. For example, they will be able to watch a time lapse video demonstrating the builders craft, interact with the display through the ringing of a doorbell, and fitting small PVC pipes together.

Get all geared up to turn a crank and move large and small inter-meshed colorful gears. Made of durable foam and safe for the smallest of fingers, this exhibit allows our guests to experience the movement of gears in a cause and effect fashion. This also provides a connection with every day gears like clocks, bikes, engines and more.

This electrifying exhibit gives our guests the opportunity to create circuits using easy to follow templates. Multiple challenges to complete circuits using lights, resistors, fans and switches provide a never ending chance to experiment. This exhibit engages people of all ages and supports individual and group experiences.

Our pepperoni is no phoney baloney! Well actually it is. This exhibit provides a space where our young guests can imagine they are operating a pizza restaurant. They can create soft sculptures of pizza using real pizza pans and peels, bake a pizza in a lighted brick “oven”, ring up the order on a cash register, and serve customers seated at cafe tables. This experience encourages creativity and cooperation while building essential math and life skills.

Local artist and art teacher, Steve Hardock, created a beautiful 5' by 22' mural for the Children's Museum classroom. Children's can take hands-on fun to a new level in guided classes taught by the MOAS education team. This space can also be rented for children's birthday parties.

A blend of science and music the Laser Harp is strung with laser beams instead of strings. Sixteen lasers are connected to a computer and when your hand breaks a laser beam, the computer triggers a rich variety of tones. Guests will create their own musical compositions that are unique every time.

Put air to work with this exhibit by dropping a large sphere in a cylinder compressing the air underneath it. This air is forced into a tube that holds a tennis ball. The compressed air pushes up on the tennis ball and launches it up to the ceiling. This exhibit can open the discussion of gas laws during museum science classes and uses of cylinders in our everyday lives.

Have fun with gravity as you create a pathway for a ball to fall from the top of the wall to the ground. Stack the track just right, using different pipes, elbows, and curves and watch this potential energy become wildly kinetic. Change the path and try something different each time.

The Bee Hive exhibit allows children to dive into the world of bees, beekeeping, and other pollinators. Become familiar with the tools used by beekeepers to tend to their hives, explore how honey is made, and learn about the food the bees are responsible for pollinating.