Hands-On Science and Discovery in the Tricity

The Baltic Science Festival opens the labs and lecture halls of Gdańsk Tech (Politechnika Gdańska) for hands-on science: chemistry shows with colored flames and smoke, robot races, DNA extraction with kitchen supplies, math escape rooms and architecture workshops. The Fahrenheit Science Picnic adds an outdoor science village at Hevelianum.

Most sessions are led in Polish. Kids who don't speak it get the most from the shows and demos.

Hevelianum fills the barracks and casemates of a 19th-century fort on Góra Gradowa, the hill above the Main Town. Around the World crosses seven continents, With Energy! is hands-on energy experiments, and Puzzle is logic and math challenges. In Playing with History, kids try on old uniforms and fire a virtual cannon by gesture. Outside, 20 hectares of paths lead to a playground and lookouts over the old city.

A hands-on science center in Gdynia where kids test the exhibits instead of reading about them. Magnesto has 10 magnetism stations, including an electromagnetic accelerator and magnet races. Tajemnice głębin shows over 40 models of deep-sea creatures, from vampire squid to glowing jellyfish. Other halls cover the human body, water, health, physics and nature, and family workshops run alongside the exhibitions.

A dome planetarium in the base of the Radziejowski Tower, a former bell tower on Frombork's Cathedral Hill, run by the Nicolaus Copernicus Museum. A 1978 Carl Zeiss projector puts the Sun, the planets and more than 6,000 stars on an 8-meter dome, showing the sky from anywhere on Earth in any season. Shows cover Copernicus's sun-centered theory, the search for life in space, and cartoon stories for small kids.

GO4Robot's party room hosts robotics birthday parties where guests build and program their own robots, then play with what they made. The birthday kid picks a theme, from Minecraft, Harry Potter and Hot Wheels to Spinjitsu ninjas, Frozen and dinosaurs, and trainers run the party while parents get time off.

The room fits up to 20 kids, and the team can also bring the party to your home.

Historia Wyspy Spichrzów (History of Granary Island) is a hands-on permanent exhibit by the Archaeological Museum on the second floor of the Błękitny Baranek granary. Kids race barrels down a timed track, haul on a pulley block, open barrels that play the sounds of a medieval port and study a granary model. A cinema shows an 11-minute cartoon about Johanek, a poor fiddler who takes work as a porter.

A branch of the National Maritime Museum in a brick-and-glass building on the Motława. Its interactive hall, "People, Ships, Ports", has over 60 stations: ship and bathyscaphe simulators, a lifeboat and evacuation chute, and a pool with a wind generator where kids sail remote-controlled model ships.

Over 40 traditional boats fill the glass lobby and the "Boats of Peoples of the World" exhibition, from a Venetian gondola to a sampan.

The Crane is a mid-15th-century port crane and city gate, the largest and oldest of its kind in Europe. Inside, a multimedia exhibition with walk-through sets recreates the 17th-century port: how ships found their way into harbor, the goods that arrived, old shipbuilding methods, and a historic tavern.

The visit ends at the crane's lifting mechanism, driven by wooden treadwheels 6 meters across.

CEPR Szymbark is an open-air heritage park in Kashubia, best known for a house built upside down that visitors walk inside. The grounds also hold the world's largest piano, two Guinness-record longest boards, a Siberian house beside a model labor camp and train wagons, and a partisan bunker reached by a low tunnel, with air-raid sound effects. Kids also get a Kashubian fairy-tale land, bread baking and a playground.