The Montshire Museum features Toys: The Inside Story Exhibition Saturday, May 30 – Sunday, August 16
Toys, one of the most popular exhibitions for children and their families, returns to the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich Vermont for the busy summer season.
NORWICH, VERMONT May 11, 2009—If your parents never let you break open your Etch-a-Sketch® to find out how it works, you'll love Toys: The Inside Story. First exhibited at the Montshire in 2007 after years of brainstorming, testing, and tinkering, Toys illustrates the simple mechanisms commonly found in toys. The exhibition features 12 engaging hands-on stations and lets visitors create their own toy-like combinations of gears, pulleys, linkages, cams, and circuits.
Jack Gets Out of His Box gives you a close-up view of the cam combination that frees our hero “Jack,” while elsewhere we unmask the amazing collection of switches, cams and motors that make Elmo® dance and Mr. Machine® run.
Many of the exhibits are free-form and open-ended in the traditional Montshire fashion. Gears at Play illustrates the effects of gear ratios as you figure out how to arrange oversized gears to spin ballerinas and a carousel. The Jeepers Peepers challenge at the pulley table may take a little experimentation to solve; the Circuit Table lets you safely use your fingers to trace working sound and light circuits.
Toys was conceived and created by the Museum’s exhibit staff with funding from a National Science Foundation grant awarded to the Montshire in 2004 and shared with six museum partners around the country comprising the TEAMS (Traveling Exhibits at Museums of Science) collaborative. Since its Montshire debut in March of 2007, the Toys: The Inside Story exhibition has traveled to seven other science museums around the country.