Technoseum

Last Weekend, after our successful move, we were gong to spend a quiet weekend getting settled in. In fact, Alex squished two of his fingers on Friday evening at the public library (they got caught under a conveyer belt used for returning books) and we both were pretty shocked, so I was even more sure we'd stay in. Well, when we got up on Saturday morning, Alex announced that he wanted to have an adventure today, bust fingers or not. I had to come up with something quickly and I had heard various people mention the science and technology museum in Mannheim, the Technoseum, so I thought we could give it a try. We took a bus, the S-Bahn, and then the tram, which took less than half an hour! (When it works, public transportation is great!). Here's Alex showing off his hurt fingers during the ride:

When we got there, we knew it would be fun, because there was a locomotive parked out front:

And Alex took this picture of me in front of the entrance. We spent a while discussing what it might be and Alex kept insisting on a star. Well, why not?

We spent almost the entire day in the museum exploring the many floors and exhibits. There were lots of historical tools, most of them set up for hands-on exploring. Here's Alex working an old crane

 and a series of pulleys.

They had wonderful little experimental stations. Here is one that Alex worked on for probably 20 minutes. I didn't see another child work in such a concentrated fashion. They had papers with the outline of a figure 8 and a pen fastened to two controls, one worked up and down, the other one left and right (kind of like controlling an etch-a-sketch). Both hands have to work in a coordinated fashion. Everyone else we saw gave up, but Alex worked out the whole thing, never going across the lines. I was amazed. My otherwise wiggly child has some serious powers of concentration!

We enjoyed lots of the other "attractions" as well and maybe even leaned some science in the process.

We had lunch at the museum restaurant which was set up like a 19th century working class pub and looked great. The food was good, too, but I'm not sure how authentic Spaghetti Bolognese is in this context.

After lunch, we enjoyed one of the other main attractions, a full-sized, fully functioning steam engine with two coaches. It runs a few times a day. We got onto the train inside the museum and it took us for a 10 minute ride inside and outside! It was great fun. Afterwards the engineer asked all the kids into the engine and explained various things to them. Needless to say, Alex was in the midst of it all the whole time!

The ground floors of the museum are dedicated to Bionics and Robotics, the technology of the future, I guess, and we spent a fair amount of time there as well, though it was really set up for older kids. This was my favorite display in that section. It measured and showed our energy output. Kind of a cool double portrait.

By the time we had made through most floors it was well into the afternoon and we decided to head back to Heidelberg. We had a fun and adventurous day, indeed.