Event Two: Pompeii at the California Science Museum

On a whim this weekend, my family decided to blow off [yet another] toddler birthday party and head instead to the California Science Museum downtown, where they were exhibiting 'Pompeii' for the summer.

I did find quite a few elements to tie it into our studies. For example, the exhibit mentioned how the old masters of art believed that in sculpting, the body should be 7 times the height of the head (Week Two: Math + Art) -- this sculpture to the left was built with those proportions. And many mathematically based tile works, like the one below, were included in the exhibit.

Overall, although I find the subject matter of Pompeii fascinating (particularly how the shapes of the bodies were preserved for years in the hardened ash), I found the exhibit to be simplistic and honestly, not that informative. Maybe it's just because I was comparing it to the Expressionism exhibit, or maybe it's intended to be accessible to a younger audience, but it seemed to be dumbed down and pumped up to be a larger experience than it actually was. Kudos to the museum for making a big event exhibit out of relatively minimal material, though!

My oldest son had a fantastic time with a child-focused hands-on exhibit about how to build an arch, combining engineering, architecture and art.  And my littlest was content to crawl around in the technology sector, while I explored exhibits such as how a camera flash works, what makes a wind tunnel, and how television functions. 

The space travel section was a big focus of the Science Center, as the Explorer has come to live there. It was a separate exhibit which we didn't pay to see, but there were lots of photographs to experience it's arrival through, as well as pieces of the Apollo and astronauts space suits to photograph.

I'd never been to the CA Science Center, so I was glad we had the chance to experience it. It seemed similar to other science centers I'd been to recently, like the Children's Museum in Atlanta, and Science North in Sudbury, Ontario. Traveling with small children in tow, as I do for work, I've found myself in many similar places over the past few years! Overall I found this one to be a bit dated and heavy handed, but as I have many fond memories of the (now extinct) Los Angeles Children's Museum from my own childhood, I'm still glad that such a place exists for my own little ones.