This is the real reason we visited Ithaca last weekend – not the ice cream, not the fine beer store and certainly not the hotel which shall go nameless with the blinking light on the smoke detector. The Sciencenter is hard to beat for an afternoon with the kids. Basically, it is only about 150 experiments to jump on, pull the rope, splash in the water or crawl through. Kid heaven.
Unlike the Children’s Museum in the Canadian Museum of Civilization there are no dioramas explaining things, no helpful staff with FedCo logoed t-shirts, no museum of the postal service – every child’s joy. Unlike the Portland’s Children’s Museum of Maine, there are no sponsored grocery store interactive displays teaching your kid to shop. But, to be quite fair, unlike either of those, the Sciencenter did not have that stage area with a real curtain and a trunk full of dress up clothes for putting on a play which is the killer app for a six year old.
No, the Sciencenter was all about science and teaching through doing in the inside exhibits as well as the outside playground. Water is explained through a spashy duck run, sinks and toilets. Lots of giggles and paying attention. There is a simple insulated room where kids can scream on the inside and watch a sound meter record decibels on the outside. Hard to get the kids away from that one. Outside swings with different rope length side by side as well as swings with intervening beams explain waves and motion. A 150 metre length of PVC tubes looped back to its beginning explains the speed of sounds and what you say into one end is heard half a second later. Kids argue with themselves. You can lift Dad seated in a chair pulling different ropes attached along the other end of the see-saw they hang from. Again, do it again!
Coming up on Ithaca week: the Farmer’s Market and Buttermilk Falls.