"How People Make Things" exhibit new in Longmont

The Longmont Museum is enjoying high attendance at its fourth-annual summer kids exhibit, “How People Make Things.”

The traveling exhibit from the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh — running through Aug. 28 — uses hands-on, real-life demonstrations to teach young visitors the mechanics behind everyday objects, ranging from Crayola crayons to computer hard drives.

The exhibit opened May 21 to an eager crowd of nearly 600 children, parents and other visitors. Before entering the museum, kids got the chance to climb on and interact with construction equipment as an introduction to the manufacturing-focused exhibition.

“The construction equipment made things a little more real [for the visitors],” said Marketing and Development Manager Joan Harrold. “Kids understand construction equipment more than they understand what assembly means.”

Inspired by the factory tour segments of the same name from the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television series, the “How People Make Things” exhibit takes kids through the process of molding, cutting, deforming and assembly using real factory equipment.

According to the Longmont Museum’s website, children can “use a die cutter to make a box and a horse, operate a 3-axis mill to carve a block of wax, assemble parts of a real golf cart and race a robotic arm to see who assembles a replica of the signature trolley from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood faster.”

One of Harrold’s goals for the summer exhibit is to allow kids to experience manufacturing processes in a fun, educating and engaging manner.

“The great thing about [the exhibit] is that it makes objects more tangible,” Harrold said. “People in general, and especially kids, are often so separated from how the things that we use everyday are actually created. ‘How People Make Things’ gives visitors the chance to see [manufacturing] in action and hopefully take some of that away to their regular lives.”

“How People Make Things” marks Longmont Museum’s fourth consecutive summer kids exhibit. Each year, the museum features a children’s exhibition designed to provide a fun, hands-on activity for families during summer vacation.

“We’ve found that the summer kids exhibition is something that families really enjoy,” Harrold said. “It’s a great way for the museum to serve the community by providing these hands-on exhibits for kids in the summer.”

In the past, Longmont Museum has featured summer kids exhibits such as “Robots Rising,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” and “Legos.” While some of these displays are traveling exhibits, such as “How People Make Things,” others are built by the Longmont Museum.

“We either look to find a traveling exhibit that will bring an engaging and hands-on experience or we create them here,” Harrold explained. “Last year’s ‘Robots Rising’ was one that we actually built in-house with a lot of volunteer hours.”

Longmont Museum maintains a commitment to making traveling exhibits relevant to the Longmont and Front Range communities. For this reason, Longmont Museum modified the “How People Make Things” exhibit by including displays made by local manufacturing companies such as Seagate, Woodley’s Fine Furniture and Left Hand Brewing. These companies created models displaying and explaining the processes going into their completed products.

Like the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood factory tours, the exhibit retains a focus on the human component of the manufacturing process. The exhibit features an area where kids can don lab coats, goggles and hardhats in imitation of real life workers.

“‘How People Make Things’ definitely encourages them to step into the role of the people who are behind the things that are being made and realize that the products don’t just magically appear,” Harrold said.

The opening of this year’s summer kids’ exhibition aligns with a time of positive growth for the museum. Over the past year, the museum experienced record-breaking attendance for a spring showcase and saw the completion of two new galleries. This positive trend not only encourages more events and exhibitions at the museum, but also lends itself to the extension of the summer kids’ exhibit into the fall.

“We’re moving more toward the model in which the exhibit will go until Christmas so that we have it open through Thanksgiving and Christmas break, and for school tours in the fall,” Harrold said.

Admission to “How People Make Things” is $8 for adults, $5 for students/seniors and free for members and children age 3 and under. The second Saturday of each month is a free day. An annual family membership to the museum is $60. Visit http://www.longmontmuseum.org to learn more.