Best Science Exhibits in New York

How to spend time in New York with children? A nice option is to spend a day in a museum and visit a science exhibition! We have collected the best science museums for kids in New York for your convenience!

Best science exhibits in New York you should visit

Skeletons of dinosaurs, stuffed animals and dioramas from the life of the peoples of the Americas are presented in the American Museum of Natural History. If your children are 5-12 years old, you should visit the Discovery Room, where you can climb onto a copy of the baobab and arrange an African safari, collect a collection of minerals and skulls, find a dinosaur’s nest at archaeological sites, examine and touch tribal objects from around the world. In the same building, there is the Hayden’s Planetarium with a spherical cinema hall where you can watch films about constellations, planets and space. Children aged from 6 to 13 years are invited to stay in the halls until the morning and feel like the heroes of the movie “Night at the Museum” (by the way, this is the place where this family comedy was shot).

You can visit more than 450 exhibits at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI). In The Great Hall, you can find yourself in the virtual ecosystem of Connected Worlds and influence its development: plant seeds, direct water from a waterfall on an interactive floor, play with the inhabitants of the jungle, desert and the underwater world. Toddlers from birth to 6 years are waiting for the preschool Place sensory play area. From March to November, you can visit the Science Playground with slides, swings, sandboxes, fog generators, a giant lever and an Archimedean screw, a water play area and metal reels. The museum also hosts pajama parties and scientific “nights at the museum”.

At the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), visitors ride bicycles with square wheels, turn geometric shapes into volumetric sculptures, play with lights and robots, assemble puzzles and study arithmetic, algebra and geometry using all kinds of interactive exhibits. Instead of eating, Enigma Cafe serves digital and geometric puzzles, and here you can see how music is related to mathematics, find yourself inside Hyper-Hyperboloid and unravel encrypted messages on a machine from World War II.

The Undaunted aircraft carrier, the Vorochun diesel submarine, the Iroquois helicopter, the Enterprise shuttle and other military-historical equipment are presented at the Intrepid Museum of the Sea, Air and Space on the banks of the Hudson River. Visitors can explore the decks, galley, cabins and the captain’s bridge of the Intrepid aircraft carrier, walk through the compartments of the Growler submarine and climb into the cabin of the Concorde supersonic airliner (children under 6 are not allowed on tours of the Concorde). An exhibition of helicopters, fighters and reconnaissance aircraft of the United States and other countries is open on the large deck, and the Exploreum interactive exhibition is located in the hangar, where you can sit in the helicopter cabins, understand the structure of the submarine, fly on jet and military aircraft in virtual simulators.

The New York Transit Museum is located at the closed Court Street metro station. In the underground hall, there are trains made up of cars of different eras with an appropriate interior, line diagrams and even advertising signs (they also arrange tours of the city subway). There are other ancient exhibits on the platform – for example, benches and turnstiles. In the halls of the museum, they talk about the construction and history of the subway, about city bus lines, railways, bridges and tunnels. Children are allowed to sit behind the wheel of retro buses and in subway cars, look into the current control room, connect the power supply elements and start the engine.

You can learn more about creating TV shows and movies at the Museum of the Moving Image. Here you can find a collection of old cameras, projectors, televisions and other equipment, as well as costumes, make-up and posters, and you can also play video games in the museum, shoot a cartoon using the slow-motion technique, make an album with an animated image from your photos, and sound fragments of famous films with your own voice, music or effects.

Amazing exhibits from around the world are presented in the collection of the Ripley’s Museum (Ripley’s Believe It or Not). There is an albino giraffe and a two-headed calf, a boat in the form of a car and passenger belongings of the Titanic, a small copy of New York – The Little Apple – and about 500 unusual items. The attraction “Black Hole” offers you to check your sense of balance, walking along the corridor with spinning walls. And you can take a photo on the red carpet with Hollywood stars, Iron Man and the Hulk, Barack Obama and the Pope in the nearby Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.

If you have a toddler or older child, you should visit at least one of the interactive museums in New York with informative exhibits and open-air playgrounds. In the Manhattan Children’s Museum (CMoM), you can end up in the jungle and cave with the traveler Dasha, build a shelter for a spectacled bear and feed it the letters of a huge dragon. At the Staten Island Children’s Museum, they play giant chess, dominoes and bowling, crawl through the steps of a huge anthill, ride a pole in the shape of firefighters and work on a construction site with real tools. And at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, visitors are given the opportunity to pet starfish and hedgehogs in the “touching pool”, play in shops on copies of this Brooklyn street, and make playhouses of cardboard and other materials in an open area.