Explore, Play, Discover: Websites, Activities, and More

Learn about the inner workings of a cell through this interactive exhibit.

Activities and History

Make a paper model that helps explain the changing tides.

Make a simple rocket and a rocket launcher, and watch a demonstration of how the finished rocket will fly.

What happens when two hockey players collide? Try our hockey collision calculator!

What is a gear ratio? And how do gears help make the bicycle so efficient?

See how TV screens create images from many tiny colored dots of light.

Map sunspots and build an apparatus for safe sunspot viewing!

Explore new social science exhibits at San Francisco’s Civic Center.

Watch old pennies turn bright and shiny right before your eyes!

High energy prices got you down? Discover how pickles can ease your troubles.

Make a spinning disc called a stroboscope, which lets you create your own animated cartoon.

Journey into Chaco Canyon, where ancient people built monuments to the cosmos. Journey to Chichén Itzá, where the Maya built monuments to the sun.

Playing games is a great way to exercise your brain. Even a simple game like Tic-Tac-Toe can teach you about strategy.

Can you trust your own memory? Find out with this activity.

Learn about common techniques for peering inside the body in order to diagnose disease and injury.

Play a memory concentration game: Listen closely then match pairs of sounds.

Come with us to Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, which is rich with thousand-year-old artifacts of the ancient Pueblo culture and contains sites that appear to have been astronomical observatories.

Can you tell the difference between human and nonhuman embryos?

With just mud, paper and an egg, you can grow colonies of multi-hued microbes!

Can a gum wrapper have a story? Discover just how important and meaningful an object can be.

Learn about the rovers that have been exploring Mars since 2004, and view the amazing images they've taken.

Can you take a sip of water from a cup with your eyes closed?

Close your eyes – and open your ears.

What happens to meat when you cook it?

Check out ColorFest, a two-month extravaganza celebrating color at the museum from July 1 to September 5.

Experiment with water, temperature, and light to see what makes a seed come out of its shell.

Not all bubbles are made with soap!

A downloadable series of graphics from our Faultline website gives a snapshot of seismic science.

An evening of wine, food, and talk.

A little physics can go a long way on that shortboard.

Just how much fat is in ground beef? You may be surprised.

Use your naked egg to experiment with osmosis, the movement of water across a membrane.

Use dominoes to model a nerve cell's transmission of a signal

Explore the surrounding sounds that everyday objects make. Build a noise contraption from these objects, then add a PicoCricket to automate your contraption. Finally, add a light sensor and program your sound automata to "play" when triggered by light.

The three most densely populated cities on the planet where seismologists expect major earthquakes are San Francisco, Tokyo, and Istanbul. Find out why the effects in each city will be very different.

The 1906 earthquake jolted geologists into focusing on how and why faults break loose.

Recycle a potato chip can into a simple camera.

Human corpses decay alfresco, all in the name of forensic science.

Bubbles are round when they float free through air. But what happens when you pack bubbles together?

What geometric shapes can you find on the playground?

Your thumb and index finger can help you test a steak's degree of doneness.

Build cantilevers from bamboo garden poles and drinking straws and discover the importance of scale.

Come with us to Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, which is rich with thousand-year-old artifacts of the ancient Pueblo culture and contains sites that appear to have been astronomical observatories.

How do scientists establish the age of artifacts, rocks, and settlements?

Come with us to Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, which is rich with thousand-year-old artifacts of the ancient Pueblo culture and contains sites that appear to have been astronomical observatories.

What do you really know about what you see?

The Physics of Skateboarding Tricks