Miami Science Museum Celebrates Father’s Day In A Big Way and hosts Big Truck Days to launch new Moving Things exhibition
June 18 & 19th
Miami Science Museum
3280 South Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33129.
Admission is FREE for dads on Father’s Day (Sunday, June 19th).

Miami Science Museum announces the launch of its newest exhibit: Moving Things on Saturday and Sunday, June 18-19, 2011, as part of the inaugural Big Truck Days weekend. Big Ryder and Miami-Dade County trucks, and several gourmet food trucks will be on site, as well as several hands-on activities for people of all ages to enjoy.

At Moving Things, sponsored by Ryder System, Inc., visitors will test their own brain vs. brawn in this fun hands-on exhibition focused on how things move from place to place – sometimes easily – sometimes with great effort…but always full of surprises. Moving Things will serve as a prototype exhibition for the new Miami Science Museum, scheduled to open in Museum Park in 2014 (Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science).

Moving Things
Millions of trucks deliver billions of objects around the world each day. Tire changes, engine maintenance, refueling, vehicle speed, and location all need to be tracked to keep things moving smoothly. Without fleet management to coordinate all the details, deliveries would take longer, cost more, and, sometimes, not happen at all!

Visit Moving Things to experience:
Packing a Suitcase: Your bags are packed and you’re ready to go! But do you have all you need? The closer objects fit together, the more you can bring. Some shapes fit perfectly, leaving no gaps between them. Now that’s close packing!
Packing Parcels: Test how efficiently you can stow oddly shaped parts into two containers in relation to cost, volume, part orientation, weight and design.
Packing a Pallet: Boxes and barrels, containers and crates, parcels and pallets. If an object is odd sized or delicate, or when there are many items, you need special packaging to make moving safe and efficient. How many people pack onto a pallet? Find some friends and figure it out!
Turntable: Place different rolling objects, including rings, disks and spheres, on a rotating turntable. How long can you make them stay on the turntable without falling off?
Flow Table: Moving through air or water takes energy: the faster you go, the greater the drag. Some shapes are more efficient than others and size matters. What patterns do you see in the flow?
Traffic: Try your hand at managing a steady flow of traffic by putting discs of different shapes and sizes on an air-suspension track that moves the discs along. Can you avoid traffic-jams and tailgating?
Suitcase gyro: Pick up a suitcase from a stand and find that it moves on its own! A rapidly rotating object, such as the spinning flywheel inside the suitcase, has angular momentum, which causes the object to resist a change in its direction.

Big Truck Days, Saturday and Sunday, June 18-19th:
On display:
Miami-Dade County Hybrid Garbage Truck: The Miami-Dade Department of Solid Waste Management was the first municipal solid waste agency in the United States to take delivery of and put into service these advanced Series Hydraulic Hybrid Powered waste collection trucks. Benefits offered by this hybrid vehicle: reduction in diesel fuel consumption, by as much as 50%; cleaner air emissions; and reduced repair costs to the vehicle’s brake system.
Miami-Dade County Hybrid Bus: The County’s New Flyer 60 ft. articulated diesel-electric hybrid bus provides the following benefits: Improves fuel mileage by 20-35%, compared to conventional buses; and Lower green house gas emissions – NOx reductions of up to 50%.
Ryder’s Detroit Diesel Demand It All Tour Trailer

Activities:
Mousetrap Car: Students from the Museum’s Upward Bound program will show visitors how to build a ‘Mousetrap Car’. Visitors can build their own Mousetrap Cars and then race them. The best design wins a prize!
Ramp Control: For very young children – Use building blocks to create different size ramps and test how fast and how far your toy car can roll.
Lego Car Prototyping space: Use Legos to build and test your own solar- or air-powered car! Then, snap a picture of your creation and post it to our gallery screens to make it part of the exhibit.
Kid in a Candy Box: Visitors can try their hand at packing and stacking different sized candy boxes into a case to see how much they can fit.

Admission
Admission is free for Miami Science Museum members and children under 3; students (with valid ID), seniors (62+) and children 3 – 12, $10.95; adults are $14.95. Entry to Stingray Sea Lab is included in the price of admission. Dads get in FREE on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 19th.
Hours

The Museum is open from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. daily.
More Information
For more information, visit www.miamisci.org or call (305) 646-4200. See the Museum on Facebook (www.facebook.com/MiamiScienceMuseum), Twitter (www.twitter.com/MiaSci) and YouTube (www.youtube.com/MiamiScienceMuseum).