Discovery Gateway, formerly The Children's Museum of Utah (TCMU), is an interactive, hands-on children's museum located in downtown

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. Comprising over of exhibit space, Discovery Gateway is located at 444 West 100 South in The Gateway.

History

The Children's Museum of Utah was founded in 1978 and opened its doors in 1983. For most of its history, TCMU was located in the former Wasatch Warm Springs building two miles north of downtown Salt Lake City. The museum started with only eight exhibits. Some of these original exhibits included the paleontology dig of a mammoth dinosaur bones, a Western Airline's 737 cockpit, the artificial heart demonstration, the frozen bubble box using dry ice, and the KSL news station for children. By 1998, TCMU had grown to 140 permanent exhibits and over of public space. That year, it had become evident that TCMU had reached the physical limits imposed by its current building, and the decision was made to relocate and expand to better serve the community. In 2002, a bond issue was approved by Salt Lake County voters to fund the relocation of TCMU to a new, larger building in the Gateway District of Salt Lake City. Ground was broken on the new Museum on 22 September 2005. Less than one year later, on 16 September 2006, TCMU opened to the public at its current location and officially became Discovery Gateway.

Exhibits

Everything at Discovery Gateway is designed with kids in mind. The exhibits are all interactive and hands-on. Exhibits on the second floor of the museum include the ''Garden'', where kids can play music together on a giant

marimba The marimba ( ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound. Compared to the xylophone, the mari ...

, keep an enormous machine humming, or peer into a “penny drop” to see how every little bit adds up. Just behind the Garden is ''Kid's Eye View'', a kid-sized town where kids can shop in the Market, build structures in the Construction Zone, or feed the animals on the Utah Family Farm. Within Kid's Eye View is ''Hatch, Waddle, and Fly'', an area dedicated just to children under the age of three. The third floor of the museum features the ''Story Factory'', where kids direct the action by putting on a

play Play most commonly refers to: * Play (activity), an activity done for enjoyment * Play (theatre), a work of drama Play may refer also to: Computers and technology * Google Play, a digital content service * Play Framework, a Java framework * P ...

, drawing a

comic strip A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...

, or making a stop-motion animated film. Also located on the third floor is the ''Studio'', where the worlds of

science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

, invention, and

art Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around ''works'' utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, tec ...

meet. The museum's outdoor terrace houses ''Saving Lives From The Sky'', which includes a real

Intermountain Healthcare Intermountain Health (formerly Intermountain Healthcare) is a United States Non-profit organization, not-for-profit Health care, healthcare system with 385 clinics and 33 hospitals in the Intermountain West (primarily Colorado, Idaho, Montana, N ...

Life Flight

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which Lift (force), lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning Helicopter rotor, rotors. This allows the helicopter to VTOL, take off and land vertically, to hover (helicopter), hover, and ...

for visitors to learn about rescue operations.

Special exhibits

A special exhibits gallery hosts rotating exhibits from museums around the nation. Previous exhibits have included ''Robots: The Interactive Exhibition,'' ''Sesame Street Presents: The Body,'' and ''Invention at Play.''

Programs

Discovery Gateway's programs explore science, art, and the humanities. Workshops and classes are geared to meet the needs of children ages birth - 12. Early Childhood Education classes take place daily in the ''Curiosity Shop'' and let kids practice fine and gross motor skills. Programs and workshops for older kids take place in the ''Workshop Room'' and often focus on the exhibits at the museum. Discovery Gateway prints a calendar of classes every month. In 2012 Discovery Gateway introduced Sensory Inclusive Afternoon, a feature in which they dim lights and cut noise in order to make the museum and its exhibits more autism friendly. The museum began a virtual concert series during the 2020

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. The following year they expanded to outdoor in-person concerts.

Outreach

Discovery Gateway offers a

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

program, ''Reaction Time'', to every 5th grade class in the state of Utah. Over 55,000 children from every county in Utah have participated in this program.

Junior Achievement city

Discovery Gateway, in conjunction with

Junior Achievement JA (Junior Achievement) Worldwide is a global non-profit youth organization. It was founded in 1919 by Horace A. Moses, Theodore Vail, and Winthrop M. Crane. JA works with local businesses, schools, and organizations to deliver experiential ...

of Utah, operates Junior Achievement City, the only JA Enterprise Village/Finance Park program facility within of Salt Lake City. Junior Achievement City offers hands-on experiences for school groups that support learning about economics, the free enterprise system, career options, and personal finance. Junior Achievement City is located on the fourth floor of the museum, and is currently open only to school groups.

References

External links

{{commons category, Discovery Gateway
Discovery Gateway Website
Children's museums in Utah Museums in Salt Lake City 1978 establishments in Utah