The Science Museum of Minnesota, founded in 1907, is a large regional science museum located in downtown St. Paul. The Science Museum's programs combine permanent and temporary exhibits; research and collection facilities; a public science education center; extensive teacher education and school outreach programs; and an Imax Convertible Dome Omnitheater—all to provide science education to our audience of more than a million people per year.
On December 11, 1999, the Science Museum opened a new 370,000-square-foot facility built into the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. The building's 70,000 square feet of exhibit space includes a 10,000-square-foot temporary exhibit gallery, plus five permanent exhibit halls covering paleontology, physical sciences and technology, the human body, peoples and cultures, and the Mississippi River. The river itself flows just outside the windows of the new facility and past the museum's ten acres of outdoor exhibits and programming space. The Science Museum of Minnesota employs over 500 full- and part-time staff, and is supported by more than 1,000 dedicated volunteers.
The Science Museum of Minnesota is known worldwide for its interactive exhibits, dynamic traveling shows, and internationally distributed large format films. The museum was an innovator in the use of live theater as a humanizing interpretive tool. The museum provides staff development programs for teachers throughout the region as well as science education outreach programs for K-12 classrooms. The Science Museum constantly explores and implements new exhibit technologies, developing the next generation of learning experiences to educate our audience about science. The museum's Science Division and St. Croix Watershed Research Station provide significant ongoing scientific research in the areas of anthropology, paleontology, biology and environmental sciences.
To support its reputation as a leader in the field in developing and producing interactive science exhibits, the Science Museum maintains a professional in-house exhibits staff of over 70 full-time members. The Exhibits Division includes talented and experienced exhibit developers, designers, prototypers and fabricators who create exhibits for display in the museum's galleries, and who provide their experience, skills and knowledge to our clients worldwide.