Plenty of Berlin's museums are built for grown-ups who read every label. These are the ones our kids ask to go back to: places where they can climb, press buttons, play old video games and stand close to the real thing. Here's what we checked, from the dinosaur hall at the Museum für Naturkunde to the medieval village at Museumsdorf Düppel.
The museum is built around its dinosaur hall, where kids crane up at Giraffatitan, the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world. Tristan Otto, an exceptionally well-preserved T. rex, and the Berlin Archaeopteryx, an early bird fossil, are on show too.
Other galleries cover minerals, the solar system, evolution and taxidermy animals, plus the Wet Collection: about a million specimens in jars of alcohol.
A large technology museum with a locomotive shed full of historic trains, a shipping hall where kids hoist sails and steer a boat into harbor, and an aviation wing with the "Candy Bomber" plane up on the roof terrace.
The Science Center Spectrum, on the same ticket, has more than 150 hands-on experiments. Outside, the museum park has a playground and picnic areas.
Science Center Spectrum is the hands-on wing of the Deutsches Technikmuseum, a building of more than 150 experiment stations that visitors are meant to touch and test. Kids light up a plasma tube, set a Newton's cradle clacking and cast colored shadows on the wall.
The stations are grouped by theme: light and vision, electricity and magnetism, heat, force and energy, mechanics and motion, and music and sound.
A hands-on children's museum in a former factory on Osloer Strasse in Wedding. The current exhibition, TALENTOPIA, is about finding what each kid is good at: building cardboard-tube cities with a construction crane, solving analog programming puzzles in a control center, painting at an art materials bar, playing word games, and making music from bottles and dishwasher parts.
There is no maze, despite the name.
MACHmit! is a hands-on children's museum inside the former Eliaskirche, a deconsecrated Protestant church in Prenzlauer Berg. Kids find their own route up a 7-meter climbing shelf, make things at the craft workbenches, and explore a changing art exhibition across two floors.
Traces of the church remain, including the tower clock, altar space and organ, alongside a historic print shop and an old soap store.
Futurium is a museum about how people might live in the future, on the Spree between the main station and the Reichstag. The exhibition is split into three thinking spaces, human, nature and technology, full of interactive stations.
In the Futurium Lab, kids can craft, solder and program at hands-on workshops, and the rooftop Skywalk opens when the weather allows.
The Computerspielemuseum traces video games from Pong and Computer Space to today, with more than 300 exhibits and many playable classics. Kids can try a 1980s-style arcade, game on old consoles in living rooms set up like the 1970s, 80s and 90s, work a giant controller, and browse the Wall of Hardware's 70-plus devices.
It suits kids who already play games; toddlers will find little to do.
Built on the former no man's land of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz, the museum traces spying from ancient ciphers through the Cold War to cyber espionage. Kids send Morse code, encrypt messages at a digital Enigma station, test secret inks in an agent lab and hunt for hidden bugs. The two-course laser maze gives each player one minute and an infrared video of the run.
A 30-meter dome built in 1987, with a 307-seat hall where fulldome projection fills the whole ceiling with stars, planets and science films. Children's shows run alongside science programs, and a separate cinema screens kids' films.
The foyer holds a free hands-on exhibition: touchscreen planets, a moon relief to run your hands over, and an immersive view from the International Space Station.
The DDR Museum shows daily life in East Germany through original objects visitors are allowed to handle. Kids sit behind the wheel of a Trabi driving simulator and walk through a furnished prefab apartment whose children's room is stocked with East German toys to play with.
Other rooms cover the Wall, the Stasi and a kindergarten corner. The Stasi section suits older kids more than toddlers.
Egyptian and prehistoric archaeology fill this Museum Island building. The Egyptian route leads from royal portrait heads to the bust of Nefertiti, and the lower level covers everyday life, the afterlife and the gods.
Upper floors hold Schliemann's finds from Troy, the Berlin Gold Hat and the Le Moustier Neanderthal. It suits kids who like ancient Egypt or treasure; toddlers tend to tire before the top floor.
A reconstruction of a village from around 1200, built on the excavated site of a real 12th-century settlement. Across grounds the size of ten soccer fields, kids walk through thatched houses, storehouses, workshops, gardens and fields, and meet rare farm breeds such as Skudden sheep and the Düppel pasture pig.
On season weekends, volunteers in medieval dress cook, carve wood, work wool and demonstrate blacksmithing and pottery.
Plenty of Berlin's museums are built for grown-ups who read every label. These are the ones our kids ask to go back to: places where they can climb, press buttons, play old video games and stand close to the real thing. Here's what we checked, from the dinosaur hall at the Museum für Naturkunde to the medieval village at Museumsdorf Düppel.
The museum is built around its dinosaur hall, where kids crane up at Giraffatitan, the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world. Tristan Otto, an exceptionally well-preserved T. rex, and the Berlin Archaeopteryx, an early bird fossil, are on show too.
Other galleries cover minerals, the solar system, evolution and taxidermy animals, plus the Wet Collection: about a million specimens in jars of alcohol.
A large technology museum with a locomotive shed full of historic trains, a shipping hall where kids hoist sails and steer a boat into harbor, and an aviation wing with the "Candy Bomber" plane up on the roof terrace.
The Science Center Spectrum, on the same ticket, has more than 150 hands-on experiments. Outside, the museum park has a playground and picnic areas.
Science Center Spectrum is the hands-on wing of the Deutsches Technikmuseum, a building of more than 150 experiment stations that visitors are meant to touch and test. Kids light up a plasma tube, set a Newton's cradle clacking and cast colored shadows on the wall.
The stations are grouped by theme: light and vision, electricity and magnetism, heat, force and energy, mechanics and motion, and music and sound.
A hands-on children's museum in a former factory on Osloer Strasse in Wedding. The current exhibition, TALENTOPIA, is about finding what each kid is good at: building cardboard-tube cities with a construction crane, solving analog programming puzzles in a control center, painting at an art materials bar, playing word games, and making music from bottles and dishwasher parts.
There is no maze, despite the name.
MACHmit! is a hands-on children's museum inside the former Eliaskirche, a deconsecrated Protestant church in Prenzlauer Berg. Kids find their own route up a 7-meter climbing shelf, make things at the craft workbenches, and explore a changing art exhibition across two floors.
Traces of the church remain, including the tower clock, altar space and organ, alongside a historic print shop and an old soap store.
Futurium is a museum about how people might live in the future, on the Spree between the main station and the Reichstag. The exhibition is split into three thinking spaces, human, nature and technology, full of interactive stations.
In the Futurium Lab, kids can craft, solder and program at hands-on workshops, and the rooftop Skywalk opens when the weather allows.
The Computerspielemuseum traces video games from Pong and Computer Space to today, with more than 300 exhibits and many playable classics. Kids can try a 1980s-style arcade, game on old consoles in living rooms set up like the 1970s, 80s and 90s, work a giant controller, and browse the Wall of Hardware's 70-plus devices.
It suits kids who already play games; toddlers will find little to do.
Built on the former no man's land of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz, the museum traces spying from ancient ciphers through the Cold War to cyber espionage. Kids send Morse code, encrypt messages at a digital Enigma station, test secret inks in an agent lab and hunt for hidden bugs. The two-course laser maze gives each player one minute and an infrared video of the run.
A 30-meter dome built in 1987, with a 307-seat hall where fulldome projection fills the whole ceiling with stars, planets and science films. Children's shows run alongside science programs, and a separate cinema screens kids' films.
The foyer holds a free hands-on exhibition: touchscreen planets, a moon relief to run your hands over, and an immersive view from the International Space Station.
The DDR Museum shows daily life in East Germany through original objects visitors are allowed to handle. Kids sit behind the wheel of a Trabi driving simulator and walk through a furnished prefab apartment whose children's room is stocked with East German toys to play with.
Other rooms cover the Wall, the Stasi and a kindergarten corner. The Stasi section suits older kids more than toddlers.
Egyptian and prehistoric archaeology fill this Museum Island building. The Egyptian route leads from royal portrait heads to the bust of Nefertiti, and the lower level covers everyday life, the afterlife and the gods.
Upper floors hold Schliemann's finds from Troy, the Berlin Gold Hat and the Le Moustier Neanderthal. It suits kids who like ancient Egypt or treasure; toddlers tend to tire before the top floor.
A reconstruction of a village from around 1200, built on the excavated site of a real 12th-century settlement. Across grounds the size of ten soccer fields, kids walk through thatched houses, storehouses, workshops, gardens and fields, and meet rare farm breeds such as Skudden sheep and the Düppel pasture pig.
On season weekends, volunteers in medieval dress cook, carve wood, work wool and demonstrate blacksmithing and pottery.
