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The DoSeum is about to throw itself a 10th birthday party

The DoSeum is located on Broadway and Humphrey Avenue.
Saile Aranda
/
TPR
The DoSeum is located on Broadway and Humphrey Avenue.

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It seems to have gone by in a flash, but The DoSeum is turning one decade old.

The DoSeum started as the Children’s Museum downtown, but then in 2015 officials built the facility at 2800 Broadway and re-branded it The DoSeum.

CEO Dan Menelly explained both what the museum has accomplished and what officials still aspire to achieve.

“It's a beautiful campus. It's about five and a half acres, and it's evenly distributed between indoor and outdoor experiences, all hands on, minds on, and we're really excited, because we've had the best luck with this community,” he said.

He noted that the museum is, to an extent, an experiment in real time to determine how best to both be a place that children learn and have a blast while they’re learning.

“We've had a great run at the DoSeum, and we're really excited for our second decade,” Menelly said. “We're focusing on capacity and culture to make sure that we grow in the right directions, and we build the right type of capacity for the city and specifically for the city's early learning ecosystem.”

Their mantra seems to be “hands-on,” because research has shown that’s the way kids learn best.

“We work in close partnership with the schools and educators in the classroom. Getting young kids ready for the future is harder work than it looks, but we love it,” he said.

Menelly said the DoSeum appeals to a wide range of ages. “Our sweet spot is really four to eight, but the DoSeum is designed for kids really from one to 11, and we've really grown in interactive technologies,” he said.

Menelly said that they’ve designed and built a new mascot to make the DoSeum even more memorable for the families who come there. “Sandra Garcia in marketing commissioned the construction of a life-sized robot form, as I believe, in built in Europe,” he said.

When the mascot arrives, he said the museum will hold a party featuring a whole range of local mascots.

“We're excited for the kids to meet it, and in this next year, to celebrate the museum's 10th anniversary, we're hoping to have a series of meetings among the mascots of all the organizations in the city,” he said. “We can't wait for our robot to meet the Spurs coyote and all of the other mascots in the city, and we might even have a convening on campus at the DoSeum.”

Menelly said a celebration for the start of the second decade takes place at the DoSeum on the morning of Jan 28.

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Jack Morgan can be reached at jack@tpr.org and on Twitter at @JackMorganii