Thursday 8 May 2014

Holiday lessons: Science & art

We had a trip into Stratford on a gloriously sunny day, bookended by a coffee and playing in a courtyard cafe and a really great lunch at The One Elm pub.



The highlight of the day though was undoubtedly the MAD museum which had three of us hooked (the other being asleep except for a bit to watch the trains choo chooing along).  

The photos can't do it justice as the artwork (although really we'd called them scienceworks) is all about mechanical motion.  Marisca loved pressing the buttons and was totally absorbed by a number of the pieces.  The one pictured below is a good example and took up at least 120 minutes of repeatedly pressing the button to make the white balls rise up the central helix to then whizz off on tracks around the sculpture with switches, sprials, jumps, and all sorts.  Absolutely mesmerising.





Marisca enjoyed all of the exhibits except for the massively loud clapping machine.  Her favourite may well have been this marble run though, which had hundreds and hundreds of marbles chasing each other all over the place, bouncing off tambourines, over xylophones, down lollipop stick staircases and the like.  Very cool.



And finally, for posterity, a nice little mechanical sculpture commissioned some time ago by my very own employer extolling the virtues of the Halifax Building Society.  If this was up in our office I'd get much less work done.




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