Bowers Kidseum becomes a tech-savvy playground for the digital age

A line of second-grade students from Davis Elementary School in Santa Ana eagerly waited in front of the Bowers Kidseum earlier this month.

Behind the closed doors of the Santa Ana museum was a new exhibit that they would get to see before anyone else, Kidseum director Jennifer Alvarado said.

“It’s called ‘Future Park,’ ” Alvarado told the class as they responded with oohs and aahs.

The doors opened.

As the students walked into the dimly-lit building, they were met with a floor and wall glowing with colors.

Color, sound and movement are incorporated in the four interactive areas of the “Future Park: Art + Technology” show running at Bowers Kidseum until Jan. 15.

The students first explored Hopscotch for Geniuses, a long board with images of spinning shapes projected onto it.

Alvarado picked one student to hop on first and encouraged the students to takes turns on the board one at a time.

As a student skipped on each shape and glided along the board, the shapes behind her dissolved into glowing lights and made dinging sounds. The class cheered.

Other areas in the show feature Sketch Town, Connecting! Block Town and the Light Ball Orchestra.

The interactive activities are part of a traveling exhibit that originated from Tokyo under Team Lab Kids, Inc., an international and interdisciplinary creative group.

“In general, this was really popular in Asia, mainly because of the combination of art and technology in this digital era,” said Team Lab Kids USA lead Jessica Paik.

The exhibit has made its way to locations such as St. Louis and Albuquerque.

“[The exhibit] has really transformed this space into a digital playground,” Alvarado said. “We know that kids sit and play video games but this is all about moving more and being interactive. It also helps promote working together and taking turns.”

Near Hopscotch for Geniuses, a room for Connecting! Block Town contained a table with small wooden objects, like houses and mountains. An overhead projector imposed images of roads, rivers and bridges onto the table’s surface.

The students slid the houses and mountains across the table, which caused the projector to reconfigure where the rivers, bridges and roads connected.

Outside the room, a large wall displayed small trucks on different roads and spaceships floating in the air for Sketch Town.

That day, Sketch Town’s digital trucks and spaceships were engineered by the students’ crayon-clutching hands.

After each student finished coloring in papers with outlines of trucks and spaceships, they placed their creations under a scanner that produced their artwork on the wall.

A separate scanner near Sketch Town also processed the paper images into printouts that students could cut and fold into 3D models of their drawings.

While some kids colored, others drifted into a more musical room containing the Light Ball Orchestra.

Oversized balls flashing shades of red, yellow and green stirred sounds of different instruments. When students picked up the balls, they heard melodies from flutes and xylophones.

“[The exhibit] is a great collaboration done in a very creative and educational way,” Paik said. “We hope that it inspires children to be curious about the digital future.”

If You Go

What: “Future Park: Art + Technology”

Where: Bowers Kidseum, 1802 N. Main St., Santa Ana

When: From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; open on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jan. 15; closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Cost: Ages older than 2 admitted for $10. Free for Bowers Museum members and Santa Ana residents on Sundays.

Information: (714) 480-1520 or visit bowers.org.

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Twitter: @AlexandraChan10