Visited the new Connecticut Science Center

It’s a fine new science museum in Hartford, CT. We visited yesterday and had a pretty good time. It’s unique in that it’s a very “urban” museum. By this I mean it’s vertical. It’s like a skyscraper with a central bank of glass elevators. Each floor houses 1 or two fairly large exhibit rooms with an extraordinary amount of hands-on features. In fact, the entire museum is hands-on. This isn’t a traditional stand-and-read museum. It’s more like a Children’s Museum / Science Museum hybrid.

That being said, a lot of the hands-on activities are not incredibly compelling. They certain look compelling, but when you actually try them out, you realize it’s just a movie with maybe the ability to move a picture around on a screen with a joystick.  And I did find a dramatic factual error with their Mars Fly-Over exhibit in the Space section.

They have this movie segment where they describe the largest known universe in the solar system, Olympus Mons. In the narration (and printed on the screen) is the following quote:

It’s caldera is 50 miles wide, approximately the size of New England.

Seriously, it actually says that.

The “ground” floor water exhibit is clearly the winner with the kids.  It is supposed to be the “intro” exhibit that gets the kids interested, but it unfortunately turns out to be the highlight of the museum.  It’s the best thing in the whole building.  Although, I must say that the Force & Motion gallery was particular wonderful, and my kids kept coming back to the Rube Goldberg golf ball machines.

I also very much liked the Eco section that highlighted green technologies for the home.  The mini wind turbine particularly caught my attention.  I hope that they keep this area up to date as technology rapidly evolves.  This section is a PRIME opportunity to partner with Eco Company partners.  For instance, I would have loved to receive some sales materials for that home turbine.  I want to know more about it from a practical standpoint.

I hate to disparage any science museum because we NEED MORE OF THEM, but it’s hard for me not to be critical.  Strangely, the stairs in this vertical museum were closed.  I heard more than one person comment, “how can you close stairs?  What could possibly be wrong with them?”  There was no answer from museum staff.  There were often long lines for the elevators.

As with many science museums there were a percentage of exhibits that were inoperable or otherwise malfunctioning.  This is always a source of major personal disappointment.  If I ran a science museum, I would make it my number 1 priority to have all exhibits up and running every single day.  If something breaks, fix it overnight.

I’m sure, however, that this is easier said than done, especially here where they have a number of incredibly complex exhibits in the Force & Motion gallery.  They’ve got Mag-Lev trains, a room-filling robotic ball shooting device, a sailing simulator that uses something like 150 fans, etc.

As with other museums, the gift shop is crazy expensive.  I noted one item of which I could offer a direct comparison.  The previous week, the kids received a large, fluid-filled bouncy ball from Borders book store for FREE with a coupon.  I think it was $4.99 without the coupon.  This exact same ball at the museum store was an incredible $12.99.

We did not eat at the museum, so we can’t comment on that, but parking was typically expensive for an urban environment.  It cost us $9 to park for about 4 hours.  Otherwise, we had a pretty good time at the museum.  It’s not some place I would visit regularly, but rather for a once a year visit or something.  I’m sure it will make a wonderful field trip destination for local schools.