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Just imagine a world without circles: Cars would not have wheels, the sun might be a triangle and pizza slices would look different.

Circles are everywhere, and that is the idea behind a new exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh on the North Side. In "Secrets of Circles," kids can enjoy hands-on, interactive activities at several stations that teach them about the ubiquitous round shape and its many uses.

"I think the idea is to bring out the magic of an everyday shape," says Penny Lodge, director of exhibits at the museum. The exhibit will be on display until May 18.

Visitors can spend hours at "Secrets of Circles" and its many hands-on features, Lodge says. The components include the Ripple Table, where visitors can touch a wand to the surface of a digital pond and watch the rippling circles it creates. The Pendulum Dance is like a computerized Etch-a-Sketch, where visitors manipulate two pendulums attached to knobs to create round shapes. The "On a Roll" feature lets visitors put balls and flat circles onto a big, spinning disc and watch where they land.

Other features include a round Vietnamese-style boat, where kids can climb in and pretend to row, and play with other round items like mock fruit. In another feature, visitors can pull two blocks, each tied to a rope, and see how much easier it is to pull the one with round wheels. Kids can take apart, put back together and walk over an arch-shaped bridge.

Written information at each stop in "Secrets of Circles" is printed in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, because of the large Vietnamese population in San Jose, Calif., where the exhibit was created. The staff at the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose introduced the exhibit two years ago, after a few years of production, and a copy of the traveling exhibit is now part of the museum's permanent collection. "Secrets of Circles" has been on a few stops before Pittsburgh.

"We were interested in doing a ... themed exhibit that could really span a bunch of age groups ... and reach out to the San Jose Vietnamese community," says Jenae Kaiser, special projects manager for the California museum.

Kaiser says the museum has gotten great feedback from visitors about the exhibit.

"We try to put a multicultural sort of spin on the idea that circles are universal," she says.

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