Adam the Scientist

[MickinMD ★]

Wednesday - especially one with thunderstorms when school is out for the summer - is apparently the best day to visit the Maryland Science Center because it's much less crowded than normal.  That's the day I took my 10 year-old nephew Adam there - the same day we learned he had scored in the top 1 percentile on all the state's 4th grade functional tests, with his highest score in math!  I had planned for us to watch the IMAX documentary "Dream Big" about young engineers and school students. He liked the film, maybe it will inspire him!

There's a new exhibit call SciLab where kids do various science experiments and there are only 6 tables so we were lucky to be able to do them all!  There are two instructors, but after I told them my background as a science researcher and teacher, they said I could supervise Adam, so we were able to quickly jump to a new table as soon as it opened up after we finished each one:

DNA Extraction - that's the goo on the stirring rod:

Moving Iodine across cell membranes - from the orange to what had been white cells.

Checking out living microbes, fixed fleas, etc. with a microscope:

Newton's Alley, with a lot of motion stuff, also included some stuff just for fun as did a lot of the center. We spent 5 hours there and didn't have time to check out everything. There were 5 planetarium shows and Adam was so into the motion, dinosaurs, waves, electricity, etc. stuff we didn't get to see any of them this time.

Baltimore's Inner Harbor from the Maryland Science Center at the foot of Federal Hill.

The National Aquarium is on the right with the pyramid-shaped roof covering part of it:

[Airehead]

Sounds like you both had fun. 

[donkpow]

Important.