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It was a morning of “Wow!,” “Whoa!” and “Cool!”

Twenty-seven 8- and 9-year-olds from Wilson Elementary in Santa Ana were the first schoolchildren in Orange County to receive a sneak peek at several Discovery Science Center exhibits--and they loved what they saw.

To start the tour, the students surrounded a cloud machine. “Somebody’s squashing me!” came a voice from the front of the crowd.

They looked up.

Delicate puffs of moisture floated into the air, drawing soft gasps of awe from the children.

Next, an exhibit showing the computerized magnification of classmate Nicolas Corona’s fingers revealed skin cells, lint--and a teeny bit of dirt--magnified 28 times.

“Yuck!” was the consensus.

“Everyone’s got that stuff on their hands,” said Scott Randol, education programs manager at the center. As he explained more about fingerprints, the children peered doubtfully at their palms.

A look at classmate Giovana Gonzalez’s pink stone ring, however, revealed a deep crystalline beauty that smoothed over the “gross” reaction they had when viewing Corona’s exposed skin earlier.

“Oh Giovana, that’s so pretty,” said classmate Yadira Rizo.

They were less impressed, however, when the magnified “tails” side of a penny revealed a figure seated in a chair. Randol prodded them to identify Abraham Lincoln and his memorial, but “It’s a little guy sitting in a house” was the closest they came to naming the 16th president.

Then it was on to the Strobe String, a whirling gizmo with a cord that changes patterns under tension: three children turned knobs as the line dangled like spaghetti, reshaped into an hourglass configuration and then elongated to form a football.

The center still is not open to the public, and the children’s visit took place amid the final frenzy of exhibit installations--their cries of enthusiasm were punctuated by the sounds of hammer blows and moving ladders.

On a typical visit, the center will provide schools with preparation packages and then have students travel a prearranged path through the more than 100 exhibits. A guide will offer explanations, ask questions and then allow students free time to explore the installations at will.

At each of the six exhibits visited by the children at this recent preview, Randol called for volunteers to touch, spin, wave or even sit down inside the installations.

Hands shot into the air, and the children begged, “Me! Me! Oooh, choose me!” Once selected they instantly became shy, giggling and squirming at the novelty of being in the spotlight before their classmates.

One of the biggest hits was the Recollections exhibit.

In a darkened alcove, every movement they made was fragmented into shadows amid swirls and showers of psychedelic lights.

Too timid to perform before the screen at first, the children finally followed Randol in a walk about the alcove, making swimming motions with their arms in the air.

Veronica Ramirez, 8, was enchanted.

“I looked like rain; I looked like angels,” she said.

After Recollections came the bed of nails, where the kids thought it was cool to watch Isaias Parra, 8, rest on a “mattress” of tiny spikes without hurting himself. (The even distribution of his weight did the trick.)

“I wasn’t scared at all--not even when the nails came up under me,” Isaias said.

But everything paled in comparison to the final exhibit of the day: The Shake Shack, which simulates three earthquakes of increasing magnitude from Southern California history.

Before they rumbled around inside the shack, the children had been asked to judge the other exhibits on a scale of 1 to 10. They gave each demonstration the highest rating.

Even after the children, and teacher Patricia Happ, sat through a 6.4-magnitude simulation of the 1933 Long Beach quake and pronounced it their unqualified favorite, they refused to lower the marks for previous exhibits.

The dilemma almost silenced the group until Martin Preciado, 8, solved the problem: “They’re all still 10, but give this one a 24.”