Enjoy the week off with these family fun activities
The Cradle of Aviation is celebrating National Engineering Week during the February school break to acknowledge the significant contributions engineers have made to improving lives and to motivate tomorrow’s innovators with an introduction to STEM skills. The museum has planned an engaging week of activities to stimulate imaginations with one-of-a kind experiences.
Activities planned include new space exhibits highlighting the past and future of space exploration, new movies and planetarium shows, free engineering activities and mini-camps for Boy Scouts and Minecraft Builders.
Highlights include:
• Visit a Lunar Module – an engineering triumph that Long Island Grumman Engineers designed, built and tested; safely sending astronauts to the moon. Introduce your family to the greatest engineering story of our time during this 50th Anniversary Apollo year. Free with Museum Admission
• Become an Engineer for Mars as you experience constructing your own mini-foam Mars Rover or design and build a Mars habitat with coffee stirrers and marshmallows. Free with Museum admission. Monday through Friday 12-4 p.m.
• See Dream Big on the big screen in our immersive Dome Theater. Witness how ordinary people found ways to defy the impossible, changing the world and their own lives in the process, in this award-winning documentary about the field of engineering. Showing Daily $9 for Adults; $8 for Seniors/Child
• Experience Music & Astronomy, satisfy the senses as you sit back and go on a visual and musical journey of NASA missions and the galaxy in our immersive Dome Theater. Students from Adelphi University will be playing live music, while the beauty of the universe and humanity’s desire to explore it is illustrated on the big screen. Thursday, Feb. 21, from 7 to 9 p.m. $15 for Adults; $12 for Senior/Child
• Respect the Game and attend the popular ’80s Arcade and Karaoke Night. Did you know that it was Long Island Physicist William Higinbotham who invented and built with a lab engineer, the first video game, Tennis for Two, at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958? Saturday, Feb. 23, 7 to 11 p.m. $15 advance tickets, $20 at the door.
National Engineers Week (Feb. 17 to 23) was founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers in 1951, and is dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers. Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day (Feb. 21) helps focus a growing movement to inspire girls’ futures so they learn they have a place in engineering a better world.
The Cradle of Aviation Museum is located on Museum Row, Charles Lindbergh Blvd., in East Garden City. For more information, call 516-572-4111 or visit www.cradleofaviation.org.
—Submitted by the Cradle of Aviation
