Investigate! A Do-It-Yourself Exhibition

Permanent Exhibit

Our Museum Exhibits team has thoroughly reviewed every exhibit component throughout the entire Museum to assess its safety and risk for transmission. As a result, some venues and exhibits, such as Investigate!, have been modified for your safety.

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." But how do you think like a scientist? Scientists try to answer questions about the world around them.

In the Investigate! exhibit, you get to be the scientist at home by following the four-step process.

• Ask a question: What’s going on?
• Make a guess: Why is it happening?
• Check it out: Conduct an experiment.
• Investigate further: What did you learn? How does it make sense with what you already knew?

Investigate! provides the materials to do a variety of experiments, along with some ideas on how to get started; from there, it's up to you! Once you’ve learned to think like a scientist, you can find things to investigate at home and beyond!

Start in the Living Room by learning about the scientific process. Try re-creating one of Galileo’s famous experiments, then listen to modern scientists talk about the thinking skills that have helped them.

In the Kitchen and Bathroom areas, several experimentation areas have been covered or removed (such as using two sinks to find out if water always drains in the same direction in this hemisphere).

In the Garage, check out the interior of a cut-away engine and explore graphing information using a motion sensor. (Note that the pressure experiment, done through a bed of more than 4,000 nails, has been removed.)

In the Front Yard, explore a collection of mysterious tools to deduce what they might be used for, and try out some simple machines.