Science Museum of Minnesota

The Science Museum of Minnesota, founded in 1907, is a large regional science museum located on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul. The Science Museum's programs combine research and collection facilities, a public science education center, extensive teacher education and school outreach programs, and an Imax Convertible Dome Omnitheater to provide science education to our audience of more than a million people per year.

On December 11, 1999, the Science Museum opened its new 370,000-square-foot facility built into the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. The new museum's 70,000 square feet of exhibition space includes a 10,000 square foot temporary exhibit gallery and five permanent exhibition halls covering the topics of paleontology, physical sciences and technology, the human body, peoples and cultures, and the Mississippi River. The Mississippi River flows just outside the windows of the new museum and past the museum's ten acres of outdoor exhibits and programming space. The Science Museum of Minnesota employs over 600 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 exhibitions, and internationally distributed large format films. The museum was an early innovator in the use of live theater as a humanizing interpretive tool and continues to be a training ground for other museums wishing to include live programming in their exhibit halls. The museum provides innovative staff development programs for teachers throughout the region, science education outreach programs for K-12 classrooms, and partners with the St. Paul Public School district to operate a K-6 Museum Magnet School. The Science Museum constantly explores and implements new technologies to educate our audience about science. The Science Museum's research and collections division and St. Croix Watershed Research Station provide significant ongoing scientific research in the areas of anthropology, paleontology, biology, and environmental sciences.