San Diego Science Center

Young had a conference this past week in San Diego so the kids and I tagged along with him for some southern California fun! San Diego is such a great place to vacation with kids...we were there for 5 day and didn't even tip scratch the surface on all the activities.

It was kinda chilly the first few days which made it easy to decided on sticking to the museums. I have a membership to a museum here in SF, Coyote Point, gave me FREE admission to several museums in Balboa Park....somehow they are all affiliated. The Ruben Fleet Science Center was our first stop.We started out in the Kid's City area...full of all the typical toys (cars, shopping carts, play food, etc) but also several interactive areas that kids had to play around a while to figure out how things worked. I could see Cameron and Timo using logic and skills to work through projects to get a result. Like the tube and ball area. There was suction in the tubes, sucking the balls up, traveling though a series of tubes and back out into a pit where you then had to crank a handle to release them into and maze and then down to the bucket! Timo followed it all the way through till he figured it out!

While Cameron was trying to figure out the puzzle...that isn't really a puzzle but she felt all the shapes fit together somehow...
Timo also figured out the blower...these tubes that blew out air that could turn the windmills, blow up a glove or make music down a series of pipes. I gotta tell ya...there was a whole lot of concentration going on in this room.
Then it was on the the conveyor belts...trying to see how they moved, what they could move and how fast they moved...
After all the brain power was exhausted....it was time to play. It's as if school was over and they discovered all the play toys. Timo had a blast on the firetruck and Cameron just wanted to drive anything.

We finally moved from the kids area down to the actual science center where we saw fog machines, movement in sand with air and water, movement in water, waves of motion and sound and countless other experiments. It's so great that science can be broken down to just pushing a button, moving a lever or turning a knob so that kids can somewhat grasp the idea.

Three hours later we were done but still hadn't been to the third floor of light and electricity! This is on our list of places to come back to!!