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Balancing Ball: Suspend a ball in a stream of air
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Balance a ball in the air with a hair dryer! This Exploratorium produced activity shows learners concepts like lift and air streams. You can try many different angles, speeds, and ball types.

Lateral Inhibition
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Which one of your eyes are dominant? Do they act independently or are they equally "in control?" This activity explores how your eyes work (or don't work) together.

Size and Distance
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In this activity about depth perception, learners create an optical illusion in a shoe box.

Disappearing Glass Rods
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In this optics activity, learners discover how they can make glass objects "disappear." Learners submerge glass objects like stirring rods into a beaker of Wesson™ oil to explore how the principles of

Color Contrast
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Do you have a hard time matching paint swatches with your furniture? When you consider human perception, color is context dependent.

Magnetic Shielding: Magnetic lines stop here
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Testing magnets is always a fun pastime, but here, we're going beyond "will it attract the magnet?" In this activity, learners will investigate which materials allow magnetic fields to pass through or

Proprioception: Wiggle where you're at
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We're told from a young age that we have 5 senses, but we have many more. One of which is our awareness of our own body part's orientation and position.

Clay Bridges
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In this activity, learners make bridges using an oil-based modeling clay (plasticene). The instructions include discussion questions for both before and after bridge building.

Clay Beams and Columns
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In this activity, learners make or use pre-made clay beams to scale and proportion. Specifically, they discover that when you scale up proportionally (i.e.

Outrageous Ooze: Is It a Liquid or a Solid?
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This activity provides instructions for using cornstarch and water to make an ooze which has the properties of both a solid and liquid.

Klutz-Proof Density Column
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Making liquids of different densities to perfectly lay on top of each other can be a frustrating exercise. The Exploratorium created this activity as a fool proof way of making a density column.

Anti-Sound Spring
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What happens when two wave pulses meet in the middle? Send waves down a spring to watch them travel and interact.

Stereo Sound
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We listen to stereo music systems, tv's, and radios because it simulates being where the sound originates.

Coffee-Can Cuíca
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Make a cuíca (“kwee-ka”), a traditional Brazilian musical instrument that originated in Africa. Played primarily in Brazil, now you can play it at home, too, with this Exploratorium produced activity.

Falling Rhythm
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Listen to the beat of gravity. By taking two strings with weights tied to them at different, yet uniform intervals, you can hear the uniformity (and rhythm) of gravity's accelerating pull.

Make Your Own Rainstick
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In this activity, leaners build their very own rainsticks, an instrument filled with pebbles and seeds that create sounds like falling rain. Save costs by using material found around the home.

Garden Poles
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In this activity, learners build large-scale structures and cantilevers in a series of "building out" challenges with garden poles and tape.

Squirming Palm
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Known as the waterfall effect, this activity demonstrates adaptation in our visual system.

Pipes of Pan
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Create an instrument that you don't play--you just listen to it through tubes of various lengths.

Magnetic Lines of Force
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With a magnet, iron fillings, and a bottle, you can create a cool demonstration about magnetic lines of force: the fillings will arrange themselves within the magnet's magnetic field.