Entertainment/Ticket

Thursday, Jun. 26, 2008

This museum is kids’ play: SLO’s $5 million Children’s Museum has reopened after four years of effort

SLO’s $5 million Children’s Museum has reopened after four years of effort

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San Luis Obispo Children’s Museum has reopened with some new high-tech bells and whistles—and a train exhibit that actually has both.

The three-story, 8,400- square-foot facility—the product of a nearly $5 million fundraising effort and a four-year process in which the old children’s museum was torn down and rebuilt—boasts a Claymation Volcano, Earth Organ and 15-foot solar-powered sunflower among its highlights, with more exhibits soon to be completed. The museum, open Tuesday through Sunday as well as some Monday holidays, is designed for children ages 2 to 12.

Though it’s still a work in progress, when finished the museum’s first floor will resemble the inside of an ancient volcano, with four caves that hold a variety of interactive exhibits. Some exhibits on the floor are already being used, like the Claymation Volcano, which allows children to use stop-motion clay animation to create their own volcano movies.

To use the exhibit, created by Cal Poly engineering students, participants manipulate and place red clay, representing lava, against the fiberglass volcano and then take a picture of the scene by pressing a button on a control panel. These steps can be repeated several times. When finished, participants hit a playback button and watch their movie projected onto an overhanging screen.

Cal Poly professor Louis Rosenberg, whose mechanical engineering students designed the Claymation Volcano for their senior project, recently got some positive feedback about the exhibit when he let his children—7-year-old son Ben and 5-year-old daughter Zoe—test it out.

“We expected them to play with it for maybe five or 10 minutes,” Rosenberg said. “After an hour we had to basically drag them out of there because they would have stayed there … they just thought it was cool and they just kept doing it.”

Rosenberg’s students also designed the Earth Organ, an exhibit that features 16 musical tubes that act as a motion-detecting synthesizer. To create sound with the exhibit, participants place their hands over one or more of the tubes, causing a light sensor to send a signal to the synthesizer that plays out of nearby speakers.

“It’s probably going to be one of the most popular exhibits because kids will crowd around it because they want to play it,” Rosenberg said. “The sound is just loud and impressive.”

Still in the works is The Magic Elevator, an exhibit that will simulate a journey from the museum’s lobby down to the Earth’s core, stopping off at the museum’s first floor. Two 42-inch television screens installed on each side of the exhibit will act as simulated windows, showing the cool stuff being passed by as the elevator descends.

Also near completion is a towering solar-powered sunflower exhibit that will provide the energy for a fountain at the museum’s entrance, as well a water system exhibit that features a waterwheel, prospector’s sluice and Archimedes’ screw that will allow children to pan for gold and participate in other activities.

Piggybacking off an idea from the previous children’s museum, the building’s second floor is a new and improved Zoomtown, a miniature city that has interactive activity areas such as a diner, fire station and farmers market. Covering the back wall of the floor is a mural of famous local landmarks like Bishop Peak and the Fremont theater.

At the center of the city stands a two-story clock in which children can swing from a pendulum and journey up into the clockworks on a 17-foot climbing structure.

Museum Executive Director Roy Mueller was recently pleased to see Zoomtown abuzz when some elementary school students tried out the city ahead of the museum’s June 19 opening.

“They knew what to do,” Mueller said. “They went into the fire station and started putting on the fire equipment. There was a little boy in the farmers market who would not leave the cash register even though activity had subsided for the moment.”

For children 4 years old and younger, the museum’s third floor, called Jellybean Junction, will have a reading room, crawling area and an interactive train exhibit.

Originally scheduled to open last year, the museum had to push back its opening because of fabrication delays, Mueller said. The facility still has some challenges—approximately $500,000 needs to be raised to finish the first floor. Mueller said he hopes the museum will be fully functional by the beginning of next year.

Most importantly, though, Mueller said he’s glad to see that San Luis Obispo Children’s Museum is being used again.

“We’re very excited to be able to open and be a resource to the community,” he said.