The Tech Museum

Over Thanksgiving break we went to The Tech Museum in San Jose.  I mean, it's Silicon Valley, so gotta go to The Tech Museum.  The museum had some cool exhibits and displays - a lot of great ideas but I think the execution could use a little work.  Having been to science museums all over the country I think this one needs a little work.  There was a lot of wasted space and some exhibits were only "single player" while others were overly complicated and took nearly an hour to "experience."    And other exhibits had cool technology on display with no explanation or information on what the technology was or how it worked.  A few other science museums come to mind that are better.  But it was still fun to go and we'll definitely be back.  We got to see two IMAX movies which is always fun.

The catching butterflies shadows.

You can hold still and a shadow of a butterfly will land on your hand.  

Walt Disney World has this in their Peter Pan line.  Lots of fun.

A building area.  Grant always has fun building.  He made an axle.  

John got in trouble here for waving pieces around wildly.

Here you could spell your name on the console and the robot arm would retrieve the correct blocks to spell your name.  We found a glaring bug in the system when the robot arm couldn't spell "Anna."  Not enough Ns that it knew how to get.  There were other N blocks there.  Great idea!  Fun.  Execution needs work. And a pretty easy fix to this execution problem.

Emma found something to climb in.  Can't remember what this was.

There was a cool exhibit where you could design a rollercoaster and then virtually ride it.  We didn't get a chance to do that one.

Checking out some of the 3D printers and learning a little about them.

Matthew and Anna both tried some basic computer animation software

Grant took the ninja test

Here Grant wore a noise sensor/microphone pack and tried to quietly navigate an obstacle course.  At the end they checked his stats to see how quiet and "smooth" he was.  He lost a few ninja points for stepping on the rubber chickens, but other than that did pretty well.

Playing with magnetic Tegu blocks.  This just convinced me that Tegu blocks are awesome and I wish they didn't cost so much.  :)

I am a big believer in blocks.  Build away my children.  Build away.  So we had fun.  We saw the IMAX movie about National Parks (in which I am convinced I never need to try ice climbing) and one about images of earth from the International Space Station.  My favorite thing was the earthquake simulator.  I thought the science museum in San Francisco used to have something like that.  I wonder if it moved to San Jose?  We got to experience an 8.something earthquake.  Scary!  We'll be back Tech museum.

"If everything you try works, you are not trying hard enough."

-Gordon Moore (of Moore's law/Intel fame)

I had to take a picture of that quote as we left because I also subscribe to this philosophy in life...as does probably every engineer ever.