articles

Mac Kid Review: Zoom Room

July 22, 2016
The original exhibit Zoom Room delivers high octane fun for kids (and adults). Young children will send toy cars hurtling through the curves, loops, dips and crash sitesโ€ฏof a colossal, multilevel race course. There are track courses designed to encourage testing and exploring every aspect of physical science, as well as complex physics challenges, such as timing cars to crash into each other or knock a car right off the track. Zoom Room is a play-filled, physics laboratory for kids.

Developed by Chicago Children's Museum, Zoom Room features
hundreds of car toys and more than 40 tracks, some up to 20-feet long and 12-feet high, making it bigger and better than anything that can be done at home.

My Mac Kid and I recently headed over to Navy Pier to visit Zoom Room at Chicago Children's Museum. From the minute we walked in, he was instantly entertained! Everywhere we turned there were race tracks - long tracks, short tracks, steep tracks, tracks with loops! My little car lover was in heaven!



While he had a blast trying out all of the different tracks, I enjoyed that he was learning about trajectory and how elevation, speed and distance affected how a car did on each track.




This track was a great lesson about how texture affected the car's speed. From a slick road to a track made of blue Muppet-like fur, my Mac Kid enjoyed trying them all out to see how (or if) the car would move!



Another fun section was these tracks on the wall. Get your car going fast enough and it would jump across the gap and land on another track! Too fast and it would fly past it. Too slow and you'd land in the box in between tracks. We spent a ton of time perfecting the perfect speed! So fun!

Zoom Room is a great addition to all of the other fun things to do at Chicago Children's Museum and we can't wait to go back and check it out again!

Disclosure: I was given two passes to the museum to facilitate this review, but all opinions are my own.