ASTC - Traveling Exhibitions

AirPlay
You can't see it, and you can't always feel it, but the movement of air affects us and our surroundings all the time. AirPlay is a set of highly interactive exhibits that allow visitors to develop an intuitive understanding of how air moves, how moving air affects objects in its path, and how, in turn, objects affect the movement of air. The exhibition is specifically designed to foster interaction among family members and groups of peers, and to allow visitors to make discoveries about air both in active and subtle ways.

Ten exhibits provide a variety of experiences. Air blowers propel bright yellow foam balls through air mazes; an anaconda-length section of transparent hose provides a tube tunnel to demonstrate how air moves through tubing, angles, and tees; model sailboats move along a tabletop, driven by the force from a bank of fans; and an air cannon shoots a puff of air all the way across a room.

Visitors can paint a wall of fluttering "shimmer disks" with a spray of air, and race balls through paths of two different shapes to see the effects of turbulence. Where does the air in a vacuum cleaner go? Visitors make discoveries about how objects are picked up in an air stream and balance objects on multiple streams of air. Finally, Ned Kahn's Aeolian Landscape provides a quiet place for extended observations of how moving air can sculpt a landscape.