crayons 1

We spent Labor Day at the Crayola Experince. This is the front of the building from the parking garage. The kids were especially impressed with the crayon crosswalk. Last time we were there the National Canal Museum was in the top two floors of the building. Admission included both places (I'm not really sure why - they're rather unrelated) and Crayola only had one floor. They just redid it all this year and Crayola now owns the whole building and it's super awesome. We were there for almost seven hours and ran out of time. We never even got to do everything there. 

Everyone gets three tokens when they go in to use on things upstairs. Since Adam, Crosby and I weren't using ours, Rory, Gage and Piper all got six. They also have machines where you can buy more. You can use them to design your own crayon, make a marker and to get Model Magic which is a type of clay. Piper is completely obsessed with purple and spent her day collecting and making purple things. 

These are the crayons the kids made. You pick your color and then choose the picture and words to be printed on the label. The machine then gives you a labelless crayon and your own sticky label to put on it.

The kids had a lot of fun with this. They have four table with about 10 iPads on each one. Everyone picks what picture they want and then colors it. You can make it spin or bubble or do a couple of other things. When its done it gets projected on the wall and swims around in an ocean. Then everyone can go find their picture and when you touch them they move and bubble like they are under water.

I had a hard time getting a picture of the wall, but the purple and yellow scribble is Piper's. There is a turtle somewhere under there. Every picture she made was a turtle that was at least half purple.

A giant Lite Brite.

Playing with Model Magic (and eating the utensils).

This was really cool. You picked your background and then posed for a picture on your own coloring sheet. Piper colored herself purple. 

The marker making machine. They have three or four rows of these set up. You pick the color you want and put your token in. They each have four different buttons on them. One picks up a marker body, one pushes in the ink reservoir, one injects ink, and one puts the end on the marker. When one action is complete the next button lights up to be pushed.