I sat in a room full of first graders as they (and I) learned all about owls. I was recently privy to one such workshop. They currently work with over 114 school districts and have 22 educators. Pricing begins around $5 per student for programs, but they have various programs which occasionally have discounted fees or combination fees. Those changes, Adams said, are coming the summer of 2022.Discovery Cube OC has an amazing place in Santa Ana, but if your kids can’t make it there, they’ll bring Discovery Cube to them… it’s science to go! Meanwhile, in the next round of upgrades, the Discovery Cube’s popular Dino Quest, which features life-size dinosaurs, will get its own rehab. Tickets are on sale for the May 28 opening and can be purchased online at oc. This summer, the center will revive the popular Bubble Fest, which is usually held in the spring but, after COVID-19 closures, will be held this year July 2-18. In addition to upgrades and new exhibits, the museum is getting a fresh coat of paint, new carpets and new heating and air conditioning units. “What kid doesn’t like a selfie?” Adams said. Kids can accumulate points during six different shopping adventures and, if they get enough points, get their photo displayed on a screen. One long-standing such exhibit, Discovery Market, allows visitors to take a shopping cart and scanner to learn about nutrition by reading food labels and making choices that are healthy and good for the environment. “If you make science more relevant to kids, help them understand it, or how it might be of use in everyday life, then that’s a better exhibit,” he said.Īdams calls it “an impact pyramid,” saying the best exhibits draw in children and encourage them to spend time playing and thinking. In designing exhibits, which are all in both Spanish and English, Adams said they also looked at what experience could have the greatest impact. “With Covid, we had to think about how do you clean it? That was important in the new design.” Adams said the cars in The Raceway, for example, are made of plastic, instead of wood, because plastic is less absorbent and cleans better. Hygiene and cleanliness issues even extend to the types of materials used in some exhibits. Also, when it reopens, the center’s capacity will be limited to 50%, or less than 1,600 people at a time. Bathrooms were redone to include touch-free faucets and hands-free door openings, and hand washing stations have been added throughout the museum. In keeping with new concerns raised by COVID-19, the renovations also took hygiene and cleanliness into account. “We want them to have more time to explore, experience the science.” “We don’t want them to just check it out and run off to the next thing,” Adams said. If an exhibit can prompt visitors to slow down and consider questions about what they’ve just seen and done, that’ll be a success. The overriding goal is to spark thought through hands-on exploration and experience. All of a sudden, it feels like a massage because your weight is now distributed. It’s going to puncture you… (But) when it’s 3,000 nails, and you’ve spread your body weight across them, that’s less than half a pound on each nail. “The idea here is that if there’s one nail, and you’re standing on it, it’s going to hurt. “That’s science in motion,” Adams said, recently, pointing to the mass-themed exhibit known as “Can you survive the bed of nails?” In another, children can learn about the distribution of mass by laying on a bed of 3,000 nails. In another, guests design airplanes, launch them through hoops, and learn what happens to the forces that guide flight. One of those exhibits features “The Raceway,” where kids and adults can build small cars, experimenting with different weights and tires to race on various tracks. One example is the laser maze, inside the “The Vault,” which is part of a new physics-themed area that will include several exhibits. On May 28, it will welcome the public to a remodeled attraction, with several new exhibits and revamped old ones. The science center took advantage of the closure to undergo a $10 million-plus renovation. Like much of the rest of the state, Discovery Cube Orange County is getting ready to re-open following a stretch of pandemic-induced hibernation. “That’s just one of our real adventures,” said Adams, chief executive of the Santa Ana science center that features the iconic, freeway-close Cube. As Joe Adams walks past what will soon be a new exhibit at the Discovery Cube, he imagines kids crawling through a maze of lasers, trying to not break any of the beams.
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