They’re on tour, and we gave them three mechanical thumbs up.

The California Science Center is pretty wonderful, too, though for my money, the Exploratorium in San Francisco is still the king of this kind of hands-on science museum, even if most of it is still pretty low-tech. The CSC has a few too many “interactive” exhibits requiring kids to hit a button to make something happen, and naturally this descends quickly into a crude form of videogaming. Trying to actually get a moment to explain what the button does only leads to frustration and the instantaneous question “Why isn’t it working?” When it’s not my kid, I always answer, “Because you broke it.”