The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center is throwing a little shade at its guests in 2022.
That’s because the Discovery Center on Friday, May 13, unveiled a new, scaly roof on its Reptilian Pavilion that offers a cool place to play during the summer. The project began in 2020, with students from the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Design starting to design the pavilion. Construction began during spring 2021 with the base structure, and was then completed this spring by eight KU architecture students and presented to the public during an informal open house.
The student volunteers originally planned to use terra cotta tiles for the roof, according to KU associate professor Keith Van de Riet, but decided to instead go with recycled, aluminum traffic signs that were shaped to look like scales by the students. Van de Riet oversaw the project, as well as the New Years Pavilion that was constructed by another group of KU architecture students and unveiled in February 2022.
The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center’s Amazing Air exhibit is reopening to the public better than ever!
The air exhibit features three separate machines that use the power of wind to push objects and defy gravity, creating a fun and educational station for children to learn about a force of nature that isn’t visible to the naked eye.
One of the features is a new, bigger Bernoulli Blower, which was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services*. This machine showcases Bernoulli’s Principle, which states that fast-moving fluids or air, such as strong winds, have lower pressure than slow-moving air. Using this principle, blowers on the machine keep beach balls aloft against the pull of gravity. This is similar to how airplanes create lift, with the faster-moving air above the wing creating lower pressure than the slower-moving air below the wing, pushing the aircraft up.
The Air Maze uses the power of air to push objects through a labyrinth of tubes. The direction the object travels is directed by flipping switches along the maze that divert the airflow in different directions. The objects then fly out of one of three openings, depending on how the switches are configured.
The Tornado Tube creates a vortex of wind and allows children to see the spinning motion of the wind by placing objects inside and seeing how they move within the tube. This is similar to the type of vortex that you see when tornadoes or hurricanes occur in nature. A vortex is a physics phenomenon that occurs when a gas or a liquid moves in circles. At the center is a vortex line that the matter swirls around.
The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center is a hands-on children’s museum with a mission to enhance the lives of children and enrich the communities it serves. Since opening in 2011 in Topeka, Kansas, the Discovery Center has become a special place where children can explore, create, discover and learn through play. The museum features more than 15,000 square feet of indoor exhibits and a 4.5-acre certified Nature Explore Outdoor Classroom. Outreach programs bring quality, hands-on experiences into our community to inspire a lifelong love of learning for every child. More than 600,000 visitors from 23 countries have visited The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center.
*The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center announced today the museum set a single-day attendance record on Thursday, March 17, 2022, with a total of 1,152 visitors. The previous single-day attendance record was set on June 20, 2019.
A number of factors contributed to the record-breaking attendance. The museum is one of the three major Topeka Dino Days venues and is hosting the Tiny Titans: Dinosaur Eggs and Babies exhibition from Feb. 24 to May 30, 2022. Tiny Titans is sponsored by Visit Topeka and the Topeka Lodging Association and has been a major attraction for regional spring break visitors. Tiny Titans is a hands-on exhibition offering an array of authentic dinosaur eggs and nests collected from all across the globe, in addition to interactive play experiences.
From left, Ainsley Schimmel, a junior at Topeka West, creates a cat using a Rigamajig Basic Builder kit as Topeka West senior Emma Banka-Bayless watches her. The students are part of a group of volunteers from the Topeka Center for Advanced Learning and Careers, better known as TCALC.
A tightly knit group of high school students from Topeka Unified School District 501 have been volunteering their time and energy to make the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center a better place for its young visitors, as well as honing their skills as potential future educators.
These six student leaders are members of the Topeka Center for Advanced Learning and Careers, or TCALC — an innovative program created through business partnerships to help teach youths about different career pathways they are interested in following. TCALC has several different professional pathways it offers to students, with this group representing the teaching pathway.
“These students are juniors and seniors in high school,” said Diane Kimsey, elementary math consulting teacher for TCALC. “They represent Highland Park, Topeka High and Topeka West. We meet every day for half a day and they all think that perhaps they would like to be teachers eventually. We have those who want to work with elementary, we have middle school dreamers and we have high school dreamers.”
So far in the four weeks they have been volunteering at the Discovery Center, the students have helped clean up the Discovery Center’s outdoor nature area, as well as creating educational materials for children. Last Wednesday, March 2, they taught young visitors of the Discovery Center about engineering using Rigamajig Basic Builder kits.
“Covid has kept us from being in the classrooms as much as we’d like to be, but at the same time we’ve had incredible opportunities,” Kimsey said. “For the last month, we’ve been here (at the Discovery Center) on Wednesdays, and we’re looking forward to this partnership to continue through the rest of the school year.”
The students came to the Discovery Center after contacting Visit Topeka to support Topeka Dino Days, a communitywide dinosaur exhibition. Staff at Visit Topeka connected the educators to the Discovery Center to support the museum as they opened the traveling Tiny Titans: Dinosaur Eggs and Babies.
Students from the University of Kansas joined the Lei family for a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday, Feb. 1, as the Discovery Center unveiled its New Years Pavilion.
The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center unveiled a new feature this month.
Thanks to the generosity of the Lei family, and the hard work of some talented college students, the Discovery Center was able to replace its old pavilion with a New Years Pavilion that blends a beautiful yet informative design to help people of all ages learn about East Asian culture. A pavilion previously on the site was dedicated in 2013 with support from family and friends in memory of Garbo Lei. The new pavilion will enhance the existing Garbo Lei Family Treasure Garden.
Eighteen students from the University of Kansas School of Architecture worked together to design and build the pavilion, which included utilizing design elements that the donor had requested. The structure was built with wood, steel and terra cotta materials.
“A good detail we did is the center is the Chinese lunar calendar, so it’s got all twelve animals on it that (each) represent one year,” said Ashlyn Reece, a third-year student at the architecture school.
Members of the club built various roller coaster ball tracks out of plastic tubing, with the children watching in awe as the balls raced down the track, doing loops, going through tunnels and even narrowly avoiding a dinosaur toy in the process.
Check out the club’s Instagram post below for more photos and videos from the event, and a big thank you to the volunteers who came out and helped educate our young people about the natural laws of science!
