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You Are Here: Home » Things to Do » Attractions and Family Fun » A Hands-on Attitude »
A Hands-on Attitude
St. Petersburg's Great Explorations allows kids to roll up their sleeves and get into their activities.
The name – Great Explorations, The Children’s Museum – provides a great framework for what you’ll find once you step inside its doors. There are magnets and microscopes, strobe lights and lasers, pipes and robots.
And there is magic.
How else do you explain a 6-year-old girl, who normally runs errands with heavy sighs and pronounced pouts, begging, “Daddy, please may I go back to the grocery store?”
The exhibit that captured her passion is a pretend grocery store sponsored by Publix, but it looked so much like the real thing, with food-filled shelves, bakery and dairy aisles and checkout counters, that it’s going to make real shopping a little easier because of the fun she had that day.
You don’t need to ask children if they are having fun. You can hear them having fun, laughing, giggling, doing their best to fit in every activity. The laser harp is captivating, but toy sailboats that you can put in front of fans are calling. After that, who wouldn’t want to strap themselves into a chair and use pulleys to lift themselves up a couple of feet into the air? “Look how strong I am, Dad!”
Back on the ground, the lie detector is a few feet away. This two-person activity monitors sweat on a person’s hand to help determine if they are not telling the truth.
My personal favorite on every visit I have made: the tennis ball launchers. Here’s how it works. A bowling
ball is fastened to a rope and ensconced in a tube. Pull the rope down to draw the ball up, then let it go. The air displaced by the ball is transferred into the adjacent chamber, where a tennis ball is ready for liftoff. A properly placed shot sends the tennis ball into a net or a track that winds its way through museum airspace before returning home.
Kids love to climb, and there is a unique climbing wall at Great Explorations. It is 18 inches off the ground, so climbers move horizontally, not vertically.
Larger exhibits, all hands-on, include Engine Company 15: The Fire House, The Veterinary Office: Be a Great Pet Vet and St. Pizza.
In Engine Company 15, children learn about fire safety as well as the life of a firefighter. This exhibit includes a fire pole and firefighter’s gear.
At the veterinarian’s station, which has toy stuffed animals, not live ones, children can role play with medical equipment that includes toy stethoscopes, though there are real X-rays on the wall. My daughter and her friend bounced around the veterinarian's exhibit, discussing how much their animals weighed and checking out their tummies. “Do they need shots?” “No, I don’t think so.”
At the role-play pizza restaurant, children can take orders then make pizzas with toppings made of felt and other materials.
The fusion of learning and fun takes place at every stop. In the grocery store, there is a giant food pyramid
painted on the wall. The strobe fan shows how the frequency with which a light blinks can stop motion. At the Bernoulli Station, children experiment with air pressure.
The Robot Lab was always in use. Visit and let your imagination run free as you build mechanical wonders, complete with the ability to move, of course. After the robot is built, connect a remote control and get it going.
Have littler ones? Check out the Great Beginnings area at the front left as you enter. Play toys are softer and the larger, faster children are outside the gate. There are plenty of places for little people to explore, complete with costumes, building sets and other toys.
Those are my highlights … for the ground floor.
Upstairs, the science and fun take a turn to the environmental side. The Great Splash Area has a stage that allows for presentations. The day we visited, we enjoyed an up-close (but not too up-close) look at scorpions. The dozen or so kids watching the presentation were awestruck.
Second-floor activities include a pinball machine that focuses on water usage, a magnet maze that leads students into the topic of estuaries, and visual representations of how much water is used in everyday activities.
For the laboratory set, there are specialized microscopes that let visitors examine water samples taken from around the area.
It all adds up to hours of fun for less than $10 a person. As we turned to head through the gift shop on the way out, the girls had slipped out of sight. The laser harp had snagged their imagination again – “Please, can we stay?” - and just would not let go.
Great Explorations, A Children’s Museum is located at 1925 Fourth St. N. in St. Petersburg. For more information, visit www.greatexplorations.org or call 727-821-8992.
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