(upbeat music) - Discovery Gateway Children's Museum offers visitors hours of interactive learning through exhibits and play.

CEO Kathleen Bodenlos is here to tell us all about some new and upcoming exhibitions at the museum, hi Kathleen.

- Hey, how are you?

- Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- The Children's Museum is such an exciting, like pillar we have here in downtown Salt Lake City.

For people who've never been there, tell us about the museum.

- So it's a huge museum and we have over 60,000 square feet of interactive exhibits geared specifically for children.

We also have art murals and we have real fossils.

- Wow, real fossils.

We do.

So tell us about some of the exhibitions that you're really enjoying right now.

- Yeah, so one of our big exhibits is a dinosaur exhibit called I Dig Dinos.

And children can actually go and dig up dinosaur bones, take them to a lab and prepare them.

They get to get up close and personal with real fossils in this exhibit, and even have hands-on experiences with real fossils.

- So your education team must just love their jobs.

They get to plan all of these great hands-on 'cause that's really how kids learn and remember all these activities.

- Absolutely, and we just opened Mark Miller Subaru exhibit and it features an electric car and it teaches children about renewable energy, which is not easy to do, but there's an enormous sun that powers solar panels, and then it goes to a charger and they get to charge an electric car so they get to put it all together in this exhibit.

- They get to do that right in the museum.

- Right in that museum, yes.

- So how many children do you think you have coming in every day?

- Well, yearly, we serve almost 300,000 children between our outreach programs and our in service, so inside the exhibits.

- Wow, so you serve so many kids of all ages.

What do you have coming up that you're also really excited about?

- I am very excited.

So it will take up 3000 square feet on the third floor, but it's an enormous model train.

The children will get to interact with and there's handcrafted buildings and there's 10,000 trees, 1,000 feet of track.

The kids are gonna love it.

- Oh, well, you guys are doing great work.

Thank you so much for being here to tell us about it.

- Thank you so much.

- If you'd like to learn more about the Children's Museum at the Gateway and visit it yourself, they have so many exhibitions and some great upcoming ones, visit discoverygateway.org, that's discoverygateway.org.

I'm Laura Durham, thank you for watching Contact.

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