Science in the City

Science and Literacy at Home Doing science activities together with your children can help build their literacy skills too! Come join us for two activities that you can do here and at home: * Building Towers: Can you use these household materials to build a tower to hold up a tennis ball? A baseball? A stack of books? How tall can you make your tower before it falls over? * Colorful Creations: Use your imagination and science skills to turn coffee filters, markers and water into a colorful creature!

Cambridge Geographic Information Systems (GIS) will provide the map layers and you use them to make a map of Cambridge. Learn how simple data can be combined to make a map showing neighborhoods, parks, water bodies, and more!

Did you know that Cambridge has a reservoir and waterworks system separate from Greater Boston? Find out what it takes to protect the reservoir and how we go from natural water to high-quality drinking water with the Cambridge Water Department.

Stormwater Pollution – An Urban Threat to People and Wildlife: Find out how stormwater washes pollutants into our rivers, streams, ponds and lakes, impacting water quality. Fresh, clean water is important to birds, fish, aquatic invertebrates, plants and people. Discover what can you do to help reduce pollution.

What happens to stormwater after it rains or snow melts? Come learn about watersheds, where stormwater goes and what rides along through the use of the EnviroScape interactive model. Enviroscape dramatically demonstrates water pollution — and its prevention and how a watershed works. EnviroScape programs communicate to people of all ages that we share responsibilities in preventing water pollution.

Join TP+T for a hands-on learning experience about how we use traffic signals to help you stay safe when moving around the city. We’ll show you the insides of a traffic signal, let you simulate signal timing for any intersection in Cambridge, and educate you about what you can do to help us reach our Vision Zero goals. Complete a Vision Zero word search and we’ll reward you with a (little) traffic signal of your own.

Trash or Treasure? Discover all the things we can give a second life by recycling or composting in Cambridge.

Come and listen to our youth entrepreneurs and interns pitch their ideas for how to communicate the realities of climate change in Cambridge. Give them your feedback, ideas, and innovations and help them towards implementation their projects this summer.

Build a City Block! What does residential density look like? Want to see more affordable housing in Cambridge? Using an interactive game called Cambridge Streets, participants can design a city block to visualize different considerations and trade-offs when building different types of housing, creating open space and transportation options for all users.