Monday 11th and Tuesday 12th July: CHICAGO CHILDREN'S MUSEUM

Today we have visited the Chicago's Children Museum, located at Navy Pier. From all the exhibitions or activities you can find there, I would choose some of them that are connected with the field of science, such as the inventing lab, the rocket science and the water ways, despite the fact that they are more aimed at children up to ten years.

In the inventing lab you can invent your own flying machine and send it soaring two stories high, engineer an alarm clock to wake the sleeping teddy bear, and scoot down the Grand Piano Slide. From this exhibit, I could take the idea of the four steps of the Computer Challenge: 1. Play, 2. Build, 3. Test, 4. Change

In the waterways you can explore the power of water as you control the flow with pulleys, wheels, and pipes or navigate your boat through the locks and dams of the mighty river. This activity could be useful for learning some concepts related to fluids dynamics, such as the Archimedes Screw.
Other activity I could use in my classes with older students could be the rocket science. They could be asked to measure the time that the rocket last in falling again, and calculate the initial speed. Changing the inclination, they could calculate the initial speed also, but applying the equations of the parabolic movement.