Magic City Discovery Center has worked to not only provide opportunities for children to learn but to experience something new with their many exhibits at different events. Here a young girl is learning about and building a Snap Circuit at the Magic City Discovery Center’s New Years Eve event.

With another year come and gone, the Magic City Discovery Center is continuing to move closer and closer to not only their Capital Campaign goal but to all plans of their children’s museum being finalized. According to Wendy Keller of the Magic City Discovery Center, they are now more than halfway to their $7 million capital campaign goal.

The Magic City Discovery Center has been working toward raising money to create their roughly 21,000-square-foot museum on park land just south of the Sertoma softball fields on North Hill. The three floor building will be home to a large variety of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) exhibits for children through age 14.

“We will be going to a higher age than most children’s museums because of our science exhibits,” explained Keller. “We want it to help fill the need for things for preteens to do.”

Exhibits planned for the museum include a variety of zones based on different themes. These exhibits will include a “Light, Sound, Action” zone, a “Build” zone, a “Move and Work” zone and a “Outside My Window” zone, which is sponsored by Roger and Michelle Tollefson, Mark Tollefson and Peggy Visina.

Exhibits of Magic City Discovery Center are expected to provide children with an exciting, hands-on learning experience that is designed to instill a lifelong love of learning, create healthier children able to navigate their world, provide children with a better knowledge base to make them ready for kindergarten and to help children develop skills needed for employment as adults.

According to Keller, planning for the children’s museum has been going smoothly so far in their campaign. Their plans for the building itself are now 90 percent complete and at the end of this month, they will be finalizing their exhibit plans.

“We’re doing well. It’s taking a while, but we feel like we’re doing it right,” Keller said.

The idea for the Magic City Discovery Center began to form in 2013 after the Minot Area Community Foundation launched a two-year listening program. Through this program staff and board visited with nearly 200 community members and 19 area businesses to try and learn what people thought the community needed. The biggest thing they heard was that there was nothing for children to do in the winter months.

Then in 2014, the Magic City Discovery Center — Museum Without Walls was started by Give360, a giving circle under the Minot Area Community Foundation. It ran from fall of 2014 to the spring of 2018, bringing in approximately 20,000 visitors and hosted a variety of events where they were able to teach the community about what a children’s museum is.

It was this same year that the Magic City Discovery Center was officially founded and became a 501(c)(3). In July 2017, they were awarded $1 million from the City of Minot Community Facilities Funds to kick-off their plans.

They have now finished their first year of what is expected to be a two-year campaign and are hoping to break ground this summer.

Over the previous year they have held a variety of events to showcase what the Magic City Discovery Center is working to do and offer to children in Minot and surrounding communities.

Magic City Discovery Center will be the only children’s museum in North Dakota. According to the Association of Children’s Museums, the only two states currently without a children’s museum are Idaho and North Dakota.

It has gotten a lot of support from the community, receiving donations from not only local people such as the Tollefson family, but also from Scheels, The Optimist Club, Community Rocks and more.

For more information on the Magic City Discovery Center or to see any upcoming events, visit their site at magiccitydiscoverycenter.com or their Facebook page.