Archive: Arts & Entertainment

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A Garden of Gizmos opens Saturday, May 23, with special hands-on activities planned for Saturday, Sunday and Monday of the holiday weekend, from 12 to 4 p.m. Kids can make a "Bee Hummer" toy that buzzes like a bee when you twirl it around, create a paper butterfly and see if they can balance it on the tip of their finger, grow green "hair" from the head of a stocking creature during the "sproutheads" activity and use chemistry to create flexible, gummy "worms."

A Garden of Gizmos consists of 15 interactive exhibits featuring mechanical flowers, plants and creatures that are as mesmerizing and fun as they are educational. In Birdland, visitors can discover simple machines as they turn a crank to make a life-sized "peacock" display its extravagant tail. Another crank controls the camshaft to make 18 rainbow "doves" form a wave. Visitors can also move a ring of "birds," making them circle and flap their wings.

Visitors can also control a time lapse movie, Sprouts, that shows different things growing throughout the four seasons in a single big window box. This includes a variety of real plants, and exhibition designer Clifford Wagner's hair! This provides a real-world, very silly measure of how long it takes plants-and hair-to grow. Flowers and veggies bloom and die, chia pets grow green fur and move around, the world outside goes from snow to summer to snow, as Clifford's hair grows long and shaggy. This exhibit helps children develop their perception of the movement of time.

Groundhog's Ground encourages social interaction as one person controls a life-size "groundhog" that passes underfoot and unexpectedly pops up in another corner. Visitors try to predict where it will pop up next!

The Blooming Rainflower is a giant "flower" made up of 13 umbrellas, which grows taller than the tallest visitor and then blooms. The mechanics are fully visible, with a giant screw moving the shafts that make the umbrellas open when a visitor turns a crank. After 15 seconds of full bloom, a motor takes over and the Blooming Rainflower wilts back to sleep, ready to bloom for the next visitor.

Displayed in the Sciencenter's upstairs traveling exhibition gallery, the Garden of Gizmos exhibition consists of several other interactive exhibits, including a Bead Stream, an Origami Flower Farm, a Rosette Kaleidoscope and a Foxglove Zoetrope. Visitors can make wallflowers dance to discover resonant frequency, inspect a variety of handmade root vegetables which automatically retract back into the "dirt" as they pretend to harvest veggies, flick their fingers to snappy music that makes the Snapdragons move, and do the Date Palm Boogie to make palm trees sway and dance with them.

Opening weekend activities are included with admission. The exhibition was designed by Clifford Wagner of Science Interactives and will be on display at the Sciencenter through Sunday, September 27.

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