Exciting Science Museums to Visit with Your Family
Science and fun don’t have to be oxymoronic. Forget head-achingly boring lessons; these museums house science exhibits so engaging and immersive that they seamlessly blend play with education.
Show kids that science can be fun for everyone by visiting one of these incredible museums around the world on your next family trip.
Play Where Art and Science Collide
A cutting-edge fusion of science and art, ArtScience Museum in Singapore is an interactive space that will captivate adults and children alike. In this museum, the visitor becomes part of the exhibit. Stand under a digital waterfall, watch your children’s sea creature designs come alive and swim in a digital aquarium, and let the kids throw themselves into an enormous pit of glowing balls that change colour when bumped.
‘Magic’ might be the word your kids gasp when entering the permanent exhibition, Future World: Where Art Meets Science; it’s science, and thanks to technology, they can draw cars that come to life on screens and move when poked, or create a spaceship that flies over a town designed by youngsters. The question is, how will you get the kids to leave?
Enter a World of Wonder and Imagination
London’s Science Museum has been inspiring exploration for over 150 years. The museum has evolved to meet the changing needs of the public, which is evident in the creative and immersive Wonderlab gallery.
Wonderlab makes kids quiver with excitement when they enter—what will they see and do first? Participate in live experiments, tinker in the maths zone, learn about forces on giant slides, or lie under a twinkling evening sky? Wonderlab inspires kids to think like scientists and ignites their imaginations.
Question Everything You Know
Canberra’s Questacon – The National Science and Technology Centre is always bustling with activity. Small feet dash up and down the spiral ramp that leads past various galleries to a water-themed exhibit. Tiny hands manipulate experiments like an earthquake simulator, a giant free-fall slide, and a robot ready for its next challenger.
Questacon raises as many questions as it answers, buzzing visitors with the possibilities for their next discovery. Young explorers aged six and under have their own zone for engaging with water play and constructing a futuristic city.
Get Curious! The Natural World Awaits
Dive into the natural world at CosmoCaixa in Barcelona. ‘Touch’ is key in this hands-on museum, featuring an Amazon rainforest with crocodiles and live piranhas, a geological wall made of real rock, and a planetarium to take kids on a journey through space.
Try experiments in the family science lab, learn through games, and discover what animals and plants are safe to touch. Don’t miss the sound telescope outside in the Plaça de la Ciència.
Roar into the Prehistoric Past
Only one of the largest museums in the world can house one of the largest dinosaur fossils ever found. Located in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York, the American Museum of Natural History boasts an extensive collection including stegosaurus, triceratops, and tyrannosaurus rex, along with mammoth and sabre-toothed cat relatives.
The star of the show is undoubtedly the 122ft-long dinosaur named ‘Titanosaur’. Even in these cavernous halls, its massive head pokes into the next gallery—welcoming guests or trying to escape? You decide!
Blast Off into Space
At the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam, visitors embark on a voyage to the stars. Touch a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite and protect Earth from outer-space dangers through an interactive game, using your shield to guard against meteorites, comets, and UV radiation. This space exploration teaches kids about the origins of life and our place in the galaxy.
Discover Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Transport enthusiasts will be thrilled by the vast collection of cars, trains, and planes at the Munich-based Deutsches Museum. As the world’s largest museum of science and technology, it features a mind-boggling array of mechanical transport, covering road, maritime, rail, aeronautics, and astronautics.
Highlights include a professional flight simulator (purely for demonstrations!) and the 42m-long U1 submarine, which was dismantled and reassembled at the museum. Kids aged three to eight will love the Kids’ Kingdom, where they can enjoy science-based play with pulleys, large Lego bricks, a giant guitar, and more.
See the Universe on Display
At the Mind Museum in the Philippines, science truly comes alive for children, inviting exploration of everything from atoms to space. The mini-planetarium in the Universe Gallery is particularly effective in bringing the wonders of the universe to life.
Want to inspire the scientists of tomorrow? The Technology Gallery focuses on how high-tech advancements can help humanity evolve.
Stimulate Your Senses with Science Experiments
Take your little ones to the renowned Exploratorium in San Francisco. Less of a museum and more of an interactive extravaganza, the six galleries cover various themes, from understanding human experiences to exploring the natural world.
Engage with light, sound, electricity, and the elements at an exciting array of activity stations. Create your tornado in a cylinder where fog meets fans, tackling many queries that curious kids have posed to their parents for years.
