Activities

Explore the fun and excitement of science and technology with these activities!

Some of them are to do at home with various ordinary materials, others are interactive online activities. The online activities work with either Flash or Shockwave, so you might need to download a plugin to use them – there’s more info and download links on each of the activity pages.

Online Experiments

• Sink or Swim! Find out how fish change their buoyancy.
• The ABCs of Lissajous Patterns. Create your own crazy patterns.
• Wave Addition. Add wave patterns together to get an amazing result.
• Questacon Cards. Test yourself with this crazy optical illusion.
• The Q mystery. Explore the fascination of overlapping images to create Moire patterns.

Experiments to Try at Home

• A stirring sight!. Explore the science in your soup.
  From Questacon's ‘Science at the Table’ book.
• Up, up and away with bottles. A fun way to learn about one of Newton‘s laws of motion.
  From Questacon's ‘Fun n Science Activity Book’.
• Musical coathanger. Things sure sound different when you try this activity.
• Balloon surprise. Find out how not to burst a balloon.
• Reading with a candle. Here’s one way to create a secret message.
• Echo in my head. Investigate how sounds can take a shortcut to your ears.
• Salt, soil and seeds. Find out how salt in the soil affects plant growth.
• Pepper scatter. Explore the forces at work in water.
• Shadow shapes. Discover what shadows can tell us about light.

There are also heaps more experiments and activities to try from the Shell Questacon Science Circus and the Questacon Science Squad, as well as puzzles from the Tenix Questacon Maths Squad!