The Bakken Museum in the Twin Cities with Kids
I’m excited to have Rebecca Nutter guest posting today to share a STEM related field trip in the Twin Cities area. If your child is curious about electricity or magnetism, this is an awesome place to explore.
(Guest post from Rebecca Nutter)
Ever since we moved to Minneapolis, I have been curious about The Bakken Museum.
The museum explores electricity and magnetism. It showcases the history of electricity and tries to excite young children to explore this world of science.
There is admission for the museum, but children under 4 are free.
The exhibits are broken up into different rooms and over all it’s a small museum. We spent about 45 minutes there.
I was pleased to see some hands on activities that were geared toward the younger crowd (toddler/preschool age).
My daughter used a small crane to lift metal cars, turned a crank to make a spark, listened to different animals heartbeats, and put a magnet up to a TV to see the magnetic field in color.
There were many other hands on activities for older elementary school kids though.
Upstairs they laid out a collection of “electrical found items” as I would call them and invited families to create something. There were telephone cords, circuit boards and other gadgety things to use.
Although it wasn’t really that interesting to our 3 year old, I like that we have a resource if this interest comes up later in her life. Looking online I noticed they have an inventors club, a LEGO robotics class and even a workshop that (for a fee) families are able to come use all the museums tools to just build and create! How cool is that?
