The Exploratorium

During our travels we went to a hands on learning experience in San Fransisco
called the Exploratorium inside of the Exploratorium they had loads of interesting experiences that you could take part in and experience including the exhibit on zoetropes heres a link if you want to find out more.

Zoetropes video

This is a game where both people have a set of cards with the same words on them. There are then five piles agree, disagree, strongly agree, strongly disagree and neutral there is a wall in between and at the end you compare results and see what you agree on.

This is a machine that measures your spinal cord by beating at your ankle and at your leg. You twist the knob in the picture above to change the timing of the beats until they are synchronised. This allows the machine to tell how long your spinal cord is by how long the message took to get from your neck to your ankle.

These are eggs that are fertilising outside of the shell under glad wrap which allows the chick the same amount of light and warmth as in a shell

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These are small fish you spin the container that they are in and they move with the stripes round and round the circle following the lights like they are mesmerised.

Here is a similar circle designed to make you feel like you are moving when it is spinning.

Inside the Exploratorium they had an area called the tinkering lab where they had blocks that you could make structures out of this was the beginning of a big spiral that I made.

This pole was attached by a pendulum to a horizontal rod. When you pressed the green button it righted itself when you pressed the red button you took control and had to try to keep it upright.

Do the directions of the stripes change to you? This is called the barber pole illusion, because of the different shapes that it fills it will look as though it changes direction.

Does this wall look straight well it is the lines in the actual pictures are 100% straight.

This arch is covered in the numbers 1 to 12 in a big grid with all of the other numbers that are multiples of the numbers in the middle. If you take the rope that is on the wall and loop it over two numbers the line will cross over the number that both numbers are multiplied by each other.

If you let this ring go it would slide into the bowl and make patterns spinning and flipping around the bowl and not fall over.

This was a project on how we assume gender. In this picture they replace a human face with an animals and giving the animal certain physical appearances that could be assumed to be male or female.

This was a co operative game in which you were all cow farmers working together to keep a heard of cows. Every season some people would lose cows some would gain cows you had to work together to keep you family alive by staying above 70 cows.

In this image I am spinning a black wheel with white stripes when you spin the wheel and pluck the strings they appear to vibrate and bend.

This is a metal version of a human figure. The button on the left controls how much the lungs inflate and the slider on the right controls the pitch of the voice you can change both to get different sounds out of the metal man.

In this camera you could see the heat in your body the darker it is the less hot it is. It was especially interesting seeing the breath coming from and filling your mask turning it white.