Homegrown Happy Valley

Soon you won’t have to leave home to take your child to a museum. Discovery Space of Central Pennsylvania is moving into 112 West Foster Avenue, where it’s leasing 4,200 square feet for a hands-on children’s museum—complete with a garden! More details about the museum will be announced at a benefit this Saturday at the Gingerbread Man.

With a focus on learning through play, the museum aims to leave children with a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them. Carla Zembal-Saul, a Discovery Space board member and PSU professor in science education, gives us the scoop on the museum’s new home.

Tell us about the new space.

It’s 4,200 square feet over one floor. We’ll have room for several permanent installations, and then there will be flexible programming based on exciting themes that change frequently. When I joined the board a little over two years ago, they started organizing opportunities to talk to and learn from other children’s museums, such as the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. Many of these places have a history of starting small and expanding over time once there’s community support. So we really think the ability to get into this property quickly—it’s looking like December of this year—and engage State College families with the space makes a lot of sense for us. We’re excited!

Why is this event and fundraising in general so important?

It’s important that people know we are finally moving forward from concept to reality. The event is where we get to launch the new location and announce the fact that we’re opening in December. We hope to build our network of friends who are willing to support Discovery Space because there are all types of opportunities for volunteers to share their time and talents. It’s a nonprofit so fundraising is always on our radar. The serious efforts to raise funds started about the same time that the economy began to struggle. Now that there is a location and we’re ready to go, this is the place to come out and show your support.

Beyond working with volunteers, how will the museum involve the larger community?

We are small and we want to keep the focus on hands-on, educational experiences for children and families, so we are not going to use any of the limited space we have for things like a restaurant or a gift shop. We’ll be pointing visitors to the local community so folks can get what they need to support their trip downtown. For example, Growing Tree is one of our partners; they may be the ones to offer T-shirts or toys that reflect one of our exhibits. We’re also working with Schlow and PSU to do cross programming. So people might start downtown, and then go on campus to another museum, such as The Palmer Museum of Art, to see something that’s tied into one of our exhibits.

One of our passions is local food. Any chance of an exhibit on the importance of eating locally?

Definitely. There’s a plot of land outside the building, and what we’re hoping to do is fence that area and have gardening and programming around the importance of eating locally and knowing where your food comes from. That’s our hope. Also, one of the spaces we’re going to have is a studio space where kids can mess around and work on art projects. But since there’s so much science involved in thinking about how we prepare our food, there are lots of hands-on activities we can do in this room involving food, whether it’s making your own salsa from tomatoes grown in the garden or investigating baker’s yeast, then baking bread.

You’re a mom. How does this museum appeal to you on a personal level?

We have always loved and will drive quite a distance to get to a museum or hands on children’s center. It has always seemed a shame to me that we didn’t have something like that right in our community - so I am very excited to be part of the movement to bring Discovery Space to State College.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Events, Kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.