Downtown Knoxville
We met two of my twin mom friends, Theresa and Laurie, with their kids at the Muse in Knoxville.
It's basically two rooms of exhibits and activities. It's relatively small, but my kids
had no trouble playing for 4 hours and we still had to practically drag them out at
closing. There are many open ended creative areas that the kids really enjoyed.
They built LEGO cars then raced them down ramps.
We watched a short movie in the planetarium about stars, planets and the sun.
The boys loved building a tunnel and knocking it down.
One of the employees was telling us about the museum's 3D printer and showed us a few of the items they have made there. I was shocked to see a stretchy bracelet and a heart that spins in half. He told us about a company in town, called Local Motors that actually printed the first real car! I had to know more, so we went to their store in Market Square. They're building a new car at a show in Detroit this week, they have it down to 44 hours and about 50 pieces, whereas a regular car is thousands of pieces. They anticipate a 18-30,000 price range for the electric car when it comes available for purchase. This is a scale model of it.
We had a ton of questions for the rep, and he ended up turning on one of the printers so we could watch a nut and bolt print. It first heats up to 280 degrees Celcius before laying down thin strands of material. He gave the kids each a set to take home. It almost feels like holding the future in our hands, it's pretty exciting.
Random items that were printed at this store. The circle is a stretchy bracelet, the
wrench really works and comes out of the printer only needing 3 small pins
to be pulled out to function. The linked chain still blows my mind!
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