Curiouser and Curiouser

Orange County’s new Discovery Science Center aims to kindle the scientific curiosity of children--and maybe their parents.

The $24-million center opens Saturday in Santa Ana with a 3-D laser theater, live stage show and about 100 hands-on play-and-learn exhibits. The two-story 59,000-square-foot building can hold 1,000 visitors. Still, officials expect initial demand to be so intense that they are requiring reservations through January.

Visitors will enter a building that was once a furniture store but is now a science fun house. The architecture is playful, right up to the 10-story cube that sits on top of the building, seemingly balanced on one of its corners.

Once through the center’s tall glass entryway, visitors find themselves in an atrium that points them to the right toward a gift shop and dining room, to the left toward the Sun Stage for live science demonstrations or straight ahead to the exhibits.

This, according to the center’s slogan, is “Science--Southern California Style”--glitzy, playful and thrill seeking.

It was playful one recent morning when 27 8- and 9-year-olds from Wilson Elementary in Santa Ana were the first schoolchildren in Orange County to receive a sneak peek--and they loved what they saw.

To start the tour, the students surrounded a cloud machine. “Somebody’s squashing me!” came a voice from the front of the crowd.

They looked up.

Delicate puffs of moisture floated into the air, drawing soft gasps of awe from the children.

Next, an exhibit showing the computerized magnification of classmate Nicolas Corona’s fingers revealed skin cells, lint--and a teeny bit of dirt, magnified 28 times.

“Yuck!” was the consensus.

“Everyone’s got that stuff on their hands,” said Scott Randol, education programs manager at the center. As he explained more about fingerprints, the children peered doubtfully at their palms.

A look at classmate Giovana Gonzalez’s pink stone ring revealed a deep crystalline beauty that smoothed over the initial “gross” reaction.

“Oh, Giovana, that’s so pretty,” said student Yadira Rizo.

They were less impressed, however, when the magnified “tails” side of a penny revealed a figure seated in a chair. Randol prodded them to identify Abraham Lincoln and his memorial, but “it’s a little guy sitting in a house” was the closest they came to naming the 16th president.

Then it was on to the Strobe String, a whirling gizmo with a cord that changes patterns under tension: Three children turned knobs as the line dangled like spaghetti, reshaped into an hourglass configuration and then elongated to form a football.

At each of the six exhibits visited by the children at this recent preview, Randol called for volunteers to touch, spin, wave or even sit down inside the installations.

Hands shot into the air, and the children begged, “Me! Me! Oooh, choose me!” Once selected they instantly became shy, giggling and squirming at the novelty of being in the spotlight before their classmates.

One of the biggest hits was the Recollections exhibit.

In a darkened alcove, every movement they made was fragmented into shadows amid swirls and showers of psychedelic lights.

Too timid to perform before the screen at first, the children finally followed Randol in a walk about the alcove, making swimming motions with their arms in the air.

Veronica Ramirez, 8, was enchanted.

“I looked like rain,” she said. “I looked like angels.”

After Recollections came the bed of nails, where the kids thought it was cool to watch Isaias Parra, 8, rest on a “mattress” of tiny spikes without hurting himself. (The even distribution of his weight did the trick.)

“I wasn’t scared at all--not even when the nails came up under me,” Isaias said.

But everything paled in comparison to the final exhibit of the day: the Shake Shack, which simulates three earthquakes of increasing magnitude from Southern California history.

Before they rumbled around inside the shack, the children had been asked to judge the other exhibits on a scale of 1 to 10. They gave each demonstration the highest rating.

Even after the children, and teacher Patricia Happ, sat through a 6.4-magnitude simulation of the 1933 Long Beach quake and pronounced it their unqualified favorite, they refused to lower the marks for previous exhibits.

The dilemma almost silenced the group until Martin Preciado, 8, solved the problem: “They’re all still 10, but give this one a 24.”

BE THERE

Discovery Science Center, 2500 N. Main St., Santa Ana 92705-6600. (714) 542-2823, https://www.go2dsc.org. Open daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except major holidays. Admission: adults $8, seniors $6, youth (3-17) $6, free to members and children 2 and under; 3-D Laser Theater tickets $2. Parking $2; $5 for valet parking on busy days.

Online Information

* For more coverage of the Discovery Science Center go online to Calendar Live! at https://www.calendarlive.com. Then click on “museums.”