First off, I want to apologize for the overly bright colors in this post. Normally my posts are gray and brown, but this one looks like it came out of a comic book. We had Skyler and Trae for the weekend while Blake and Apryl were away. Since it was a rainy cool day and I had had enough Saturday morning cartoon action we decided to go to Science Central at Fort Wayne. The building in which Science Central is housed was the old Fort Wayne power plant circa 1920's that was used to convert coal into electricity. Most county seat town had these power plants, and there are only a few remaining in operation in Indiana. Several years ago Fort Wayne politicians decided to sign a lease with the Indiana Michigan Electric company to provide electrical service to the city of Fort Wayne. I&M didn't need or want an old out of date power plant since they had plenty of capacity in other areas so the power plant was shut down. After several years some bright minds decided to convert the power plant into an science education and demonstration center. About half of the building has been filled with all sorts of displays to allow mainly kids of all ages the opportunity to see and experiment with hands on physic, biology, palaeontology, meteorology, mathematics etc. There are normally nationally traveling exhibits, like the Hubbel space telescope exhibit that is currently there , which was pretty cool. Sprinkled in or rather built around are the remnants of the old power plant, a bridge crane, a steam turbine generator, a boiler and lots of piping, now all brightly painted and not the original drab green or grey.
About a year ago I was asked to provide an estimate to renovate the other half of the building into more exhibit space and to take over the maintenance of the building. Since they are already operating on a shoe string budget and there is little likelihood of the University doing the maintenance for free we were never able to come to an agreement. I think the big grant they were hoping to get fell through as well. Even so it is a great facility for kids of all ages.
One interesting and sort of exciting, in a scare your mother to death sort of way, was a high rail bicycle. The bicycle has wheels that are slightly groove and sit on top of a steel rail about 1/2" wide. There is a counter balance attached to the bike and hangs under the track that compensates for the weight of the rider and keeps the bike upright sort of. There is a platform on one side in case someone gets stuck along the way so the staff member can go out an get their bike back. On the other side is open space with about three stories of nothing but net below.
Trae and Skyler both took a lap
They even let old guys give it a try.
Trae stood in line and tried out the moon walk equipment. the harness hooked to a cable and to a hydraulic pump simulates a semi-weightless environment.
Another section has a saltwater tidal pool exhibit with creatures normally found along the ocean shore.
It's a very hands on type of exhibit, with the staff allowing kids to touch live animal and watch them move under water. This star fish was placed back in the water upside down and in a mater of about three - five minutes turned itself over. It was sort of like slow motion acrobatics.
Clarice and Jon were needing to go to Fort Wayne anyway, so they met us there and later in the day we go together at a restaurant for late lunch, early dinner.
Of course you have to have an exhibit with lizards and snakes. This was not Karen favorite part of the trip.
Karen found this stationary bike. I don't think we were producing much electricity.
After I looked at the guy next to me I decided to give up.
Fort Wayne has a lot of links to mastodon fossils. The University's mascot is a mastodon and there are plenty of old bones laying in display cases on campus.
No comments:
Post a Comment