Mobile Museum
Just how do you make a museum?
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You can make a beautiful building, but how do you know what to put in it? We don’t have divine intuition. The only way to know what exhibits will be successful is to test them over and over again with our future guests – kids and their parents!
That’s why we created our mobile museum: It’s a set of revolving “rough draft” exhibits made from inexpensive materials. MOD will take these to events throughout Santa Cruz County. We are seeking as much feedback as possible from anyone who wants to play!​
These events will also create the opportunity for us to raise awareness about the museum and start conversations about what people want to see inside.
The mobile museum first premiered at the 2013 Santa Cruz County Fair and was a huge success! We played with over 1,000 kids who had lots of fun and gave us great feedback.
Our exhibits included: An air wall where kids manipulated a jet stream of air to see how far they could propel a ping pong ball, a fishing exhibit, where kids learned about sustainability by first catching fish, then sorting them and throwing the unsustainable ones back, and “Float or sink?” where kids guessed whether objects would float or sink in a tub of water and then thought of creative ways to make sinking materials float.
Kids have lots of fun with our fishing exhibit!
All in all, the event was a huge success, thanks to our amazing volunteers and the great families that came to play with us! We are excited about bringing the mobile museum to more events like this in the future.
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Interested in volunteering with us?
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Where do the mobile exhibit ideas come from? A group of enthusiastic individuals have put their heads together to come up with prototypes that are:
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inexpensive
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work for multiple ages
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are easy to setup and cleanup
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don’t require lots of supervision or resetting the activity after each child finishes
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fit into an existing exhibit pod (agriculture, trees/ forest, tech/ innovation, fishing/ ocean, boardwalk/ recreation)
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are more about the process of play than about making a single product
Got an event you think we should be at? Request MOBILE MOD by filling out the form below, and look for a mobile event near you!
Fill out the form below to begin scheduling our next visit to your classroom or community event with the Santa Cruz Children's Museum of Discovery Team!
We will contact you to confirm the availability of the dates requested.