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Hi
Not sure if this has been posted before, apologies if so . Anybody with a science-y kid going to the Bay Area - check out the tech museum in San Jose. We also did the Chabot space and science center and the exploratorium which were great but the SJ Tech museum hands down was fantastic. You know how children's museums can sometimes feel like they all do the same thing? The Tech was original. Favorite things - using swap out puzzle pieces to design circuits - first to program a robot then to program a car. In both cases effectively taught logic, on off, if thens, it was awesome.
Favorite at Chabot - the telescopes, saw sun activity and they had a neat program where you could fly into a black hole! All Highly recommeded!

The Tech
Chabot space
Exploratorium

DeHe

My kids enjoyed Chabot when we went last year on a school outing. They also really enjoy the Exploratorium. Most recently we went to Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley and they really enjoyed that too.

What do you think the minimum age for the Tech would be? my son would be in heaven but unsure if my almost 6 yr old daughter would enjoy it or not.

We JUST left that area My boys would have loved that! We will check it out the next time we are in CA.

We spent the night 2 years ago at Chabot with an overnight cub scout thing. In the summer at least, they have overnights for families. I would highly recommend it- we had an astronomer give us lectures about what we were seeing, then we looked at the skies through the big telescope. It is late though, like 10 pm.

I think if they enjoyed the exploratorium they would like it but it is more narrow in subject matter. DS is super sciency and this appealed to him much more than the exploratorum although he reslly liked that. What I found especially great about it were the computer and robotics stuff which we had not seen before. It seemed more thought out in terms of introducing and making programming fun.

If you go, try during the week, when it opens, we had it totally to ourselves!!!

DeHe