COSI the hands-on musuem for kids

3D whales! Nearly too much.

Let me start by saying this place is enormous. We spent a good 5 hours there and I don’t think we saw all there was by any stretch. Although we had a great time seeing family and friends while in Columbus, our visit to COSI was the main reason for our trip. We both had been to COSI on multiple occasions as kids and really love our memories of our time there. This was our first chance as parents to go back and see if it was as cool of a place for our kids.
It’s is hard to know where to even start. With over 300,000 square feet of fun, it was one adventure after another. Here were a few of our favorites: the Titanic exhibit, Gadgets & Progress (a replica town of times past).

Ezra would possibly argue that the Little Kidspace was the best and rightfully so for him. It was an enormous space for the little tikes to experiment with building a house, floating balls on air, driving an ambulance, running through the trees, & just running wild.  Those in 1st grade and above where separated out upon entrance to their own room with lots of books, drawing materials and games to play so that the little people could play uninhibited by their older siblings.

The Titanic exhibit was incredible and extensive. Along with having parts of the ship rebuilt right there in the museum, it also had tons of artifacts and relics that have been excuvated off of the ocean floor. It was really mind blowing to see so many pictures taken below the sea and to then see the artifacts there before you almost perfectly preserved after nearly a century.  The replica of the main hallway was impressive until we came to the grand stairway.  It was stunning. We were there on a Saturday so it got a bit congested at a few points and we had to stand in line before moving on to the next section but overall it was even easy to navigate 2 kids and pushing the stroller.

Gadgets – a very hands-on ‘how it works’ section, was Canaan favorite and Ezra was going nonstop as well.  They have pulley chairs to test your strength, a huge area to bolt together metal pieces and try to make bridges, towers or what-ever they can think of and a laser table with mirrors and fog. Ezra spent most of his time throwing plastic balls into this huge funnel that was hooked to a big wheel that was hooked to a cam on a pump that would shoot the balls half-way across the room. If it worked right the balls would then fall into another funnel about 30 feet in the air. They would then take one of two paths through a bunch of strange tunnels, wheels, pulleys, etc and down to the bottom where the kids placed magnetic tubes on a metal wall to experiment with routing the ball where they wanted it to go.  There was also the hand-crank light bulb and the wacky tv screen where you placed magnets on the screen to see how it warped the pictures. Needless to say, it was an awesome place for the kids to burn energy and at least for our 7 year-old, it was a really cool way to learn a lot about how things work.

Other exhibits included; Ocean, where you walked through a submarine setting and were able to shoot water cannons; Space, an echo-less room & a space simulation kinda thing; Big Science Park, outside activities including a gravitron (think the county fair) and the amazing lever where you and your kid can lift a car; Grossology, which I thought was really cool with its giant walk in nose holes and fart simulators (no, I am not kidding), our kids where only mildly impressed. I think if they were more in the 10-12 year old range they would have really been into it.

We ended the day with a 3D movie on the several story high movie screen at the theater. A beautiful movie, narrated by Darral Hannah, showed species of dolphins as they swam in waters around the world. You have your choice of 2 movies, with varying show times to watch during your COSI visit. It was really nice to end the day on a calming note.

Columbus Vacations

The kids loved the movie and we loved having some time to decompress before heading onto the next adventure. *note~ the movie was an additional charge.