Side Quest: San José Tech Museum

A couple weeks ago Michael and I took a walk down to the San José Technology Museum! At first he accidentally lead us to the art museum and we bummed around, but after realizing there isn't much tech there, we went across the street to the real museum. I saved the whole adventure as a snapchat story which converted into a video clip for some reason... so here I've pieces together the adventure without the videos.

Here's us entering the museum. We were fairly impressed at how large and artistic the building was structured. We started our journey by going to the top floor.

Without knowing anything about the museum, we were pleasantly surprised to see that it's main audience is children... meaning there was a lot of hands-on equipment... meaning we were really excited to touch all the displays.

Here's a simple machine where you can learn binary. By connecting the circuit, the input changes from 0 to 1. I spelled Michael's name out for him. It was pretty cool.

In between the two areas up top were some robots! Here is a sorting bot, lovingly named Alphabot who spells whatever he is told using the little wooden blocks. The children were having a time by just punching in random letters. Michael and I felt our hearts go out to Alphabot.

Also there's Buster. He's cool we asked him for some selfies. He talks and gave Michael a fist bump.

On the other side of the top floor was just more activities, mainly involving sound/music and genetics. There's another part I forgot to mention, but it's these small devices where you scan your ticket and take quizzes.

Then we took a venture to the underground level. Here they had displays for robots and body-tracking technology.

This is a furby display that Michael and I were extremely charmed by if not also very frightened of. We watched a little boy with his mother play with the controls. We never touched the thing.

Here's the body tracker, and Michael playing it. Then a picture of the earthquake room.

Before the simulator goes off, we're allowed to build some foam buildings. Michael's is the large building, he thought a good foundation might make it last. I just made a lot of small stacks. it was fun to watch them fall.

Right next to the earthquake section was an area dedicated to space travel and mars. There was a cool jetpack chair thing, but the line was too long.

Another area taught us how to pick locks and be bandits! :)

We finished the day by getting sick pennies of course. It was a good time that smelled heavily of popcorn and filled with the sound of laughter. See you next time, SJTech!