Disclaimer: My family received free tickets to Science City for review purposes. All opinions and experiences are my own. Yours may differ.
In the heart of Kansas City is Union Station. Built in 1914 this former train station used to house 900 rooms and accommodate tens of thousands of travelers every year. After years of being neglected, in 1999 Union Station was restored to its former glory and now is home to several restaurants, Science city, several permanent as well as rotating exhibits, gift shops, a planetarium, an Amtrak stop even a movie theater!
Right now in front of Science City is a temporary exhibit called “Aliens and Androids”. Here you learn about life on other planets, space exploration and as well learning about robotics. My kids loved posing with Iron Man, C-3Po and R2-D2. They avoided the alien statues though! No amount of convincing was going to make them go near them.
Science City is an amazing Science Center that houses several fun exhibits! Once inside you are surrounded by this beautiful cityscape and have several fun options of activities. Right through the doors to the right is a music station. Here you can bang on trash cans, walk on a sidewalk piano, turn on a fan to make wind chimes chime and several other unique forms of music. My kids love this first station.
Next we were off to the tree house. In the tree house you can learn about different kinds of birds and hear different bird calls. There is a fun staircase spiraling down the tree to move on to the next location.
The dinosaur dig is always a popular favorite. Hidden in the digging pit are several dinosaur bones. Science City provides your little paleontologists all the tools they need to dig out the dinosaurs. Behind the pit is a lab that shows you the process of of finding and excavating dinosaur bones. It is pretty interesting to see the tools and bones they have on display inside the lab.
The Science on a Sphere exhibit was new since we had last been there (which had been a year and a half). It is a really interesting circular room with a large floating planet in the middle. Here you can learn several different aspects of Earth life as well as other planets. This particular presentation was about ocean temperatures. My favorite presentation of the few we watched was about flight traffic around the Earth. It was really interesting to see the busy hubs around the world and especially all the flights at night and how the traffic would totally pick up as the morning approached. This was a really interesting and education room.
One of my favorite exhibits is the Mr. E Hotel. Inside these rooms there are 20 optical illusions. It is really fun to go from room to room and see the fun illusions. This time we visited it looked as though the Hotel was in need of repair as several of the optical illusions were missing key pieces to make it work. I’m not sure what so many objects were missing, but I hope Science City works to restore that very fun exhibit.
Last time we visited I wasn’t brave enough to ride the sky bike, but this time I did it! This bike is on a wire and is weighed down with 450 pounds of bricks. The weight of the bricks guarantees the bike will stay on the wire. You are allowed to swing from side to side while you are on the bike because you will not fall, but I have some height issues so just getting from one end and back was brave enough for me! They do have a safety net as a precaution in case you were wondering.
As you can tell from my pictures there are plenty of things to do to keep everyone busy as Science City. They do have a Kinderlab for small children as well. I love that there is something for everyone packed into this clever museum. There are several other exhibits I didn’t even mention such as the test kitchen, the CSI lab, some fun in the sewers, the animals, the tot lot, the KC rail experience, Model Railroad experience and the Science of Energy. This education and fun attraction will easily keep you busy for hours. We stayed for about 3 hours. Even then we hadn’t gotten a chance to see or do everything, but my baby was done and my kids were tired. We had such a blast at Science City. This is a MUST on your Kansas City travel list!
