(upbeat music) - Discovery Gateway is a hands-on children's museum in downtown Salt Lake City, offering over 60,000 square feet of interactive exhibits and programs.

Joining us today is CEO Kathleen Bodenlos.

Hi, Kathleen.

- Hi.

- Thanks for being here.

The Children's Museum has been at the Gateway for, it's been one of the pillars, let's say, at the Gateway for a long time, and so many children go through that museum.

- Oh, there's so many, yeah.

So we see hundreds of thousands of kids a year, and we've been there at the Gateway for 25 years, but prior to that we were on Beck Street for 25, so almost 50 years.

- That's right.

And at your new location, you have all of this square footage, and I understand that you have some new interactive exhibits that you wanna tell our audiences about.

- We do.

Yeah, something really innovative that we started doing on our third floor, which were a lot of current and forthcoming renovations are happening, is that we're trying to construct exhibits that engage not only the children, but also the parents, so they can have fun learning together.

- Tell us about one of those exhibits.

- I will.

Yeah.

So we just installed the Stillson River Railroad exhibit, which is the largest model train exhibit in the Intermountain West, covers 3000 square feet.

And one of the really unique cool things about it is that it's set in the 1950s.

So it gives parents an opportunity through the vintage cars and clothing to talk to their children about history, which is like a really hard concept for kids to get sometimes.

- Yeah.

That is so neat.

I love that you offer not only exhibits for the kids just to run free, but also an opportunity for parents to interact and have that educational moment.

And your exhibits are very purposeful when it come, you talk about STEM and STEAM.

- Yes.

Yeah, we bake STEAM into everything we do.

We have our art studio where you can drop in and do a really cool art project with our art instructor.

And we have a science lab where you can drop in and see some really cool experiments.

But every single one of our exhibits is designed to include science and technology, engineering and math.

And the kids are having so much fun.

They don't even realize all their learning.

- Oh, that's amazing.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

I hope you get a lot of new people out to see those new exhibits.

- Well, thank you so much for having us.

- If you'd like to learn more about the Discovery Children's Museum at the Gateway and all of the wonderful exhibits they have, simply go to discoverygateway.org.

That's discoverygateway.org.

I'm Laura Durham.

Thanks for watching "Contact".

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