Joyce W.
Yelp
We came here on the Sunday before July 4th (which landed on a Tuesday this year) and it was good timing! Not too many people here at all. We went to church first (honor God first, always ^_^), and then came here after lunch. I had no idea what part of Lodi this place is located in, except that it's downtown and I had only been in Lodi once or twice prior to this trip. It's only 25 minutes (or 20 depending on your speed, hehe) on 99 from Elk Grove. We got here and saw that there's a parking structure next door. For sure I thought it'd cost us $ to park there but surprisingly it was a FREE public parking structure, yes!!!
So we got to the museum and Luis the front desk staff was super polite and very helpful. He provided excellent customer service, telling us about the different things we could do there. We then got right into it. The place isn't huge, but they made good use of the space. Perhaps a little disjointed as the various exhibits did not seem to be grouped by themes/topics, but it was still organized enough to have a good time and not get confused.
We started at the plasma ball, my husband explained it to the kids, apparently I wasn't paying attention and science stuff kind of gets lost in my head. Next, we went to look at the big tree or some kind of a tree. We also played with a couple of pin ball machines. A volunteer staff person was demonstrating closing an electric circuit (even I can understand that, haha), so my kids did that next. They also looked at some bugs and stuff under the microscope, played with the earthquake machine, stepped in the tornado machine, and went into the lights and shadow exhibit hall which is in the back of the museum. ETA: I just looked at one of the pictures here and it's officially called the Jim Pyers Illumination Lab (Jim Pyers created and built MANY of the exhibits at WOW and they're all really nicely done, thank you Jim!)
Actually, my younger one had moved on into the toddler play area at this point already, so my hubby and older child went off and did pretty much the whole museum while the little one played in the toddler area which yes, as other reviews have said, could use a cleaning. Still, it was a fun area with big soft building blocks, a couple of lock/peg boards/walls that my littler one loved, a magnetic table that he played with for a long time, and some fake fruits and a toy wheel barrow. There was also a train table. Seats available for parents to hang out. Overall, it was fun in the toddler area.
What else did we do? We also "flew" a (out of commission) plane (it was the same lift off, flight, and landing every time on the screen though, haha), flew some paper helicopters through a wind tunnel up to the ceiling, played with bubbles, learned about our cardiovascular (heart, etc.) system, learned about the sun in the solar electric lab, and just had so much fun!
The bathrooms are just ok, not kids friendly, but it was clean enough. As we were leaving, Luis wished us well and encouraged us to come again. He was friendly, helpful, and answered a few questions we had. We didn't interact with many staff on this trip, but we appreciate that the staff here were kind and genuinely concerned about their patrons, especially the littlest ones. =) We plan to be back!