COSI Day 2 - A Dose Of Knowledge And Culture

In the morning we had breakfast at the hotel, went for a swim and then headed back to COSI.

On Day 2 We did the second floor. Before we went up however we did the energy exhibit.

At the exhibit there is a torture devise where you put your hands on some copper plates whicle someone else cranks a generator so you can feel what electric current feels like.

Tash and Abby lasted less than a second, I did a bit more. Leah on the other hand could have kept her hands on the plates for hours - she didn't feel it at all, which was kinda strange but certainly a neat trick.

Up on the second floor is a very extensive exhibit about the human body and health.

We did tests of strength, hear rate both resting and active and flexibility.

After those we signed up for a lab to make hand sanitizer. After being dressed in a lab coat, safety glasses and gloves, You had a choice of using alcohol, tea tree oil and witch hazel or any combination in a test tube with an aloe base to design your own sanitizer.

Then you got to test your formula using a petri dish that you first touched with your unwashed hands in one section, left a section alone for a control and the third you touched after using your sanitizer.

The lab was run by students from OSU's College of Pharmacology and they did a great job leading the kids through the scientific method. Then the dishes were incubated and you could check online later to see how you did.

Leah did a sanitizer with more alcohol than anything else, and it showed in the results:

Tash deliberately omitted the alcohol:

The lesson: Alcohol kills germs kids, tea tree oil and witch hazel alone aren't going to cut it.

Next we went to the Progress Exhibit with walkable streetscapes and shop interiors from 1898 and 1962.

Next the kids got to explore Space. After landing the lunar lander on the moon and crash-landing the space shuttle a few times they jumped in the Gemini capsule for liftoff and re-entry:

Whoever designed the Gemini simulator had a sense of humor - take a look at some of the labels on the lights and buttons:

For the finale at COSI, the kids headed outside and between the two of them lifted a Honda off the ground into the air:

Give your kids a place to stand, and they will move the car. Then tomorrow, they'll move the world.

After COSI we headed to the Cheesecake Factory. In Columbus there was no waiting at all and we were immediately seated. Compare that to the 2-3 hour wait currently at the Michigan Cheesecake Factory in Novi Michigan. Great food, great service - I had the Hibachi Steak which seriously rocked, and Stupendous Cheesecake! The family shared two slices - a Peppermint Bark and a Smores Cheesecake. Verily they were ambrosia upon the plates. If you've got a Cheesecake Factory near you, it's worth it, except for the long waits at the new Michigan location. Hilariously enough, at the restaurant we ran into some friends from Michigan that happened to have just arrived that day and they were taking their kids to COSI the next day - what were the odds of that?

After that we headed back to the Hotel. In the morning, we had breakfast and hit the road and headed back home. With no driving rain while driving this time, we made it home in great time.

COSI is really worth a visit, and Columbus is quite the nice city to visit.

At COSI Day 1

So we piled in the car and started to drive to Columbus, Ohio.

A nice warm day and just as we crossed the Ohio state line it started to rain, and it kept raining al the way to Columbus. Not a light rain either, but flood advisory type rain.

Rain notwithstanding and while it was still pouring, we arrived at COSI.

As a result, the first set of doors at the front were held open by people running back and forth, and we similalry dashed into the entrance, past the second set of glass door and headed in.

The second set of doors were clear.

Why does this matter? Well it was only at the end of the day as we were leaving, with the front doors closed that I saw this sign, which had previously been invisible as it was only the side of the door and not the front nor back that was visible on entry:

It's a Good Thing, considering I wouldn't have realized that it was improper to do so until I left that day, that I wasn't carrying my M&P 40c concealed in a Vanguard holster completely concealed under a sweater then, now wasn't it?

So we got our tickets and also signed up for an extra Adventure in the Valley of the Unknown for the kids, which is what we did first.

The adventure is an interactive exhibit where kids have to solve puzzles, seek hidden symbols and try to reason their way into the locked observatory to find knowledge.

The maze had numerous tricky puzzles to solve including on that closed sets of doors, trapping you inside until you figured out the right sequence, a laser-beam filled passageway that you ahd to maneuver through to get a hidden symbol and much more. The layered puzzles took quite a bit of time and the kids found it interesting and at times scary.

The staff at the Adventure exhibit were very good at pateintly assiting them find the missing symbols when needed and coaching them on steps to figure puzzles out while leaving it up to them to solve them.

But they persevered and made it into the observatory where they could find the following stele:

They then had to decode the stele. here's a hint, the first line reads: Seek

The second reads: Challenge of the worthy.

Abby really got into decoding the stele, the kid's got a future with the NSA methinks.

She then went on to decode the second stele:

By this point Leah was bored so she and Tash headed to the Curious George exhibit while Abby kept on decoding.

My bet is Borepatch can decode these with one hand tied behind his back without breaking a sweat....

We had lunch in the COSI cafeteria and the food was surprisingly decently priced, and quite tasty. This was a refreshing change from the average museum or science center cafe with subpar food at way over par prices.

Next we did the Ocean exhibit, where they proceeded to get a bit wet while doing the hands-on experiments.

They got soaked the most positioning a ball on a water spout so it would hang suspended on the water and not fall off, and they managed to do it after only a few tries:

They even went into a research submarine:

After that they had frozen yogurt made by a robot.

This answers the question as to what fast food places will do if minimum wage is pushed up to $15/hr - get robots:

Give a robot a properly setup workstation and simple parameters and can easily make a frozen yogurt to order - or flip burgers for that matter.

After the frozen yogurt they declared they were all done, so after about 5 hours at COSI the rain had stopped and we headed to the hotel and went for a swim in the pool. Then we had dinner, went to bed and prepared for COSI day 2. it was a fantastic first day at COSI.