“Throwing the book” at someone requires more than a powerful forearm and a leather-bound football-shaped phone book--it takes years of careful investigation. Learn how to toss like a pro with today’s Groupon: for $25, you get two adult admissions to CSI: The Experience at The Franklin Institute (up to a $51 value).
Based off the hit TV series and staged inside The Franklin Institute until January, CSI: The Experience plunges would-be Sherlocks into the life of a crime-scene investigator with hands-on scientific displays and crime-solving challenges. As they comb through an exhibit filled with faux cadavers, crashed cars, and used-looking toothbrushes, amateur detectives examine mock crime scenes with forensic techniques such as blood-spatter analysis and toxicology reports. Through hands-on activities with real forensic equipment and multimedia displays, visitors learn the roles that gun-mark identification, latent prints, and forensic entomology play in cracking cases.
This Groupon also grants visitors general admission to the rest of The Franklin Institute, a dynamic museum founded in 1824 to honor Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin. The hallowed scientific halls are filled with interactive exhibits such as Space Command and Sports Challenge. Take a walking tour of The Giant Heart, or reach for luminous balls of plasma during a show at the Fels Planetarium, which is included with the price of admission.
The Franklin Institute
The Franklin Institute brings hands-on science fun at Pennsylvania's most visited museum. Spanning three floors, the Institute gives a voice to human ingenuity—past and future—with hundreds of interactive exhibits such as The Giant Heart, Changing Earth, and Sports Challenge, as well as explosive live science shows, an indoor SkyBike ride, and the city's tallest IMAX theater,which is 5 stories high. Though now filled with a range of space-age attractions, the Institute began with single purpose.
The Background
Samuel Vaughan Merrick and William H. Keating established The Franklin Institute in 1824, to honor the life and achievements of Benjamin Franklin. In the following decades, the Institute hosted forward thinkers such as Nikola Tesla, who gave a demonstration on wireless telegraphy in 1893. In 1930, the board decided to expand the space into a new science museum—and raised the funds in 12 days. The museum opened to the public in 1934—and in the same year hosted the first public demonstration of an all-electronic TV system.
The Highlights
A visit to The Franklin Institute’s includes access to three floors of permanent interactive exhibits including the iconic, two story tall Giant Heart. Other exhibits include Space Command, which invites visitors to recover an unmanned space probe and examine real astronaut equipment. At Changing Earth, visitors create their own weather patterns, play with steams of water, and build structures that can stand up to earthquakes or all-elephant 5Ks.
At various daily showtimes, the Franklin Theater’s high-contrast screen displays 3D films on animals, earth ecosystems, and human history. In the recently renovated Fels Planetarium, the second oldest in the nation complete with a rooftop observatory, audiences witness projections of weather and space spread across a 60-foot seamless aluminum dome. Daily live science shows draw an enthusiastic crowd, and interactive science carts invite visitors to observe a live heart dissection or try their hand at paper-making.