Nice family fun day event. We spent almost four hours and saw just about everything in both buildings, the butterfly house and the caboose. It seems likes half of the exhibits are permanent and half rotate. Friendly staff - knowledgable and happy to chat.
Awesome place to spend the day with the family
Great asset to our city, especially the dome. Lovely grounds in a promising area. My only squabble: dome presentations and exhibits need to change a lot more frequently. I've gone several times and very little would have changed. I'd go more if there were more to see. A membership is worth the freedom of going at will; however, it's far more worth the fact that you join a network of museums across the country and world where you can get in free! Buy during a big event when they may be offering it at a steep discount.
If you are local to the area and have small kids, this place is great! It's a great place to first experience science. It has a small dome planetarium. It uses many shows from the UNC planetarium (which I love). It's easy to come here with not many other visitors around. Which makes it a great place to first discover science. Because we went in a small group and had the small dome planetarium to basically ourselves, my son (who is special needs) was able to sit through his first planetarium experience! At UNC he has only made it through the first five minutes before we have to leave so we don't disrupt everyone else. The center also provides several exhibits that are hands on. Which is a great way to learn and allows for the fun aspect to take over while children don't even know they're learning. However, the things I did not like were several expectations that I thought were not clearly stated and not easily done by children. There is a taxidermy area, I think it is very cool, but you shouldn't advertise it towards children (especially smaller ones). In these areas we were told to walk not run (reasonable), do not touch anything (reasonable but already hard), and to not be loud (maybe reasonable under certain circumstances). However, my point is this, although these things are reasonable to a certain degree. How do you give elementary school aged children free range in this area and you want them to do all of these things at once? It's not realistic. If we all had our own space, like at a desk in a classroom (probably still unreasonable, but that's a different issue) maybe this could have been achieved. Maybe even walk them around in a line, explaining as you go? A little tour of sorts. Keep them interested and engaged in areas where they have such strict limitations on behavior. Just ideas. If you have small children, I would just skip these areas, even if they try to push them on you. The butterfly area is neat. Not like most of the butterfly areas/houses I have been to. The rest of the people I went with were disappointed by it. However, I will tell you why I liked it. This area was outside. It was in a screened in greenhouse type of environment. Most of the ones I have visited are either wet or dry rainforest environments (or something else similar). The other adults I was with thought this to be nothing special and all things you could find in any backyard locally. Yes, they were right, however what I saw was the children's excitement. Not everyone has butterfly bushes and a wide variety of butterflies at their house. They don't all have butterfly boxes where they can watch the caterpillars turn to butterflies. They also don't have the concentration of butterflies that were found in this area. The kids were very excited as the many varieties of butterflies flew around them, landing on them, and just being graceful creatures. I also thought it was a great oppurtunity to not just see tropical exotic butterflies that I am used to seeing at places like this, but to see up close, with not so shy butterflies, the type of variety that we may find at our own homes, at local parks, and at local areas. One of those moments like when someone moves to the area from another country and they have never actually seen a squirrel, deer, or opossum. That moment when we remember how special our own backyard, county, state, and community is! The gift shop is small, but I found it offered a lot of what small children would like, as well as enough different types of science related activities and gifts. The prices in the gift shop were also extremely reasonably priced. I find this is becoming more of a trend in science centers, but even so, I have never seen prices this good. If you gave your child $2, they could leave with a small item or two or possibly three and leave very happy, and with something interesting. Overall, I recommend a visit.
My 2 year old loves to play here
Danville Science Center is a US Movie Theater based in Danville, Virginia. Danville Science Center is located at 677 Craghead St, Danville, VA 24541, USA.
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