If you’re looking for fun things to do in Fort Lauderdale, the Museum of Discovery and Science is for you. Targeted to kids, but fun for the whole family, MODS is the perfect place to get off the beach and into the air conditioning. Located on SW 2nd Street in downtown, the museum is close to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts and the restaurants along Himmarshee Blvd.
MODS has two floors of exhibits as well as an outdoor science park and a separate IMAX theater. During the weekends, they regularly have extra hands on displays, programs in the science theater and kid projects throughout the museum. My favorite thing about MODS is that it makes science so much fun that your kids don’t even realize they’re learning anything!
You enter the museum right into the Florida Ecoscapes exhibit, which contains many native species, like the alligators, sea turtles, snakes, sharks and even bats. Wind along with the exhibit in a kind of indoor nature hike. You can even climb upstairs and see tarantulas, cockroaches and other creepy crawlers. There is a special Discovery Center, perfect for children under 6 to crawl, climb and build on their own. As you head back through the first floor, learn all about waste, recycling and how to create an energy efficient house.
There is a huge exhibit focused on violent weather, like lightning, tornadoes and hurricanes. Learn how they test structures to ensure they’re safe for hurricanes, stand in a wind tunnel and create your own cloud. You can also practice giving a weather report for the local news. There are many newpaper and television clips on display from Hurricane Andrew, which hit this area in 1992 as one of the few category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the US. Tyler loved standing in the wind tunnel as the storm intensified from a tropical storm all the way to a category 5 hurricane. And he looked like he had been through a hurricane when he came out!
Learn all about the Everglades and how South Florida gets its water and then take a simulated airboat ride. And then go back in time to prehistoric Florida, where you might wind up in the mouth of an enormous shark! Weigh yourself against the quantity of food that prehistoric animals ate and dig for shark teeth. There is a large otter habitat in the back of the first floor, where you can watch a family of otters play on the ground and dive deep to swim in the water.
Outside, learn all about science while you play in the outdoor science park. This area is so much fun for the boys! There are different pulleys you can use to pull yourself up in a chair to test which ratio is the easiest to use. There is a ball range, where you can shoot balls through a series of hoops and learn about trajectory. Have a tug of war to pull massive levers to your side and make music with all different kinds of outdoor instruments.
Upstairs there’s so much more – and lots of hands on activities perfect for older children. There is a large traveling display area here. When we went the exhibit was all about dragons – there were Chinese dragons, medieval dragons and even bearded dragons on display. There are hundreds of Keva blocks and several tables set up so that you can sit and build. Plus there are models on display to encourage your creativity. The boys enjoyed just sitting here and building for awhile. Our projects were nothing like those on display, but it was a great chance to try these blocks and practice our architectural skills.
There’s an area to make your own paper airplanes. Then you can launch them with a special launcher through a series of rings that are hanging over a long runway. We had so much fun making and launching airplanes in this area and trying different methods to get ours to go the furthest.
In this same area there are several displays about force. You can feed colorful scarves into a series of tubes that snake up the wall and across the ceiling before shooting your scarf back out to fall to the ground. The boys loved sending the scarves up in a series and then running around trying to catch them again in the same order. There are also a few different tubes that blow air up and you can try to balance small colorful balls on top of them so that they blow in the wind without falling down.
The Hanger Makerspace was really cool. They have several project areas set up in here for kids to make a variety of recycled art projects. You could make anything you wanted really! They also had one table set up for creating a straw rocket to launch at a bullseye. The boys found one table set up with Cubelets and it was hard to tear them away. We had never seen them before, but Cubelets are small square robot blocks that each do something different. By combining them you can create a robot that does something. Ryan created a robot with a light on it that moved forward until it sensed heat. Tyler created a robot that turned toward motion. These were really cool and encouraged the boys to really think creatively.
Always a hit, the Innovation of Flight exhibit has a plane cockpit that you can climb in as well as several simulators. There is an area to learn about how wings work. There’s also a huge display about the parts of an A-380 that shows just how much goes into creating an airplane. The boys loved trying all of the simulators and even pretended to parachute down!
Finally, there is a huge exhibit about your body. Powerful You teaches you about what happens when you call 9-1-1, what your lungs look like inside, how important it is to drive safely, and talks about all kinds of surgery, including minimally invasive robotic surgery.
We spent nearly 4 hours in the museum moving from display to display and trying out everything at least once. We packed a lunch to eat outside at the tables that surround the Great Gravity Clock. We didn’t see a movie, but there are regular showings in the IMAX theater. If you’re looking for fun things to do in Fort Lauderdale, the Museum of Science and Discovery is a perfect place to go.
Things to Know Before You Go
- There is metered street parking and a lot available right outside the museum. The museum can be busy on weekends, when there are events, and in the summer with camps, but it wasn’t very crowded when we visited on a Friday in June.
- Allow plenty of time to see all of the exhibits. It’s easy to rush through, but there is a lot to do here.
- You can bring food for lunch and waters, but cannot eat in the museum. There are tables just outside by the clock. There is a sandwich shop and a gift shop just outside the museum. You could also walk down the street to the east and find many restaurants.
