Children's Museum of Bogotá

Leonardo da Vinci Exhibit in the Children's Museum

The Children's Museum of Bogotá (Fundación Museo de los Niños) is a privately managed museum foundation in Bogotá, Colombia's capital city, established in 1986 and aimed at teaching children about science, technology, culture and arts. The foundation operates the Children's Museum in an 8,000 m² (86,000 ft.²) building in the geographical centre of Bogotá, in which over 23 different modules and hundreds of individual exhibits are housed. The museum serves approximately 150,000 visitors per year — 69% of them children under 11 years of age that come to "learn by playing" in the exhibits.

In addition to guided tours, the Children's Museum conducts workshops, special vacation programs for children and highly structured events for schools.

To celebrate their 15th anniversary, the museum invited the most important young Colombian artists to each paint a mural on the museum walls. This resulted in a collection of 42 murals which have become a landmark for art students in Bogotá. Another highly important program of the Museum is the "Computer Clubhouse" — an international program promoted by the Intel Corporation and the Museum of Science, Boston. "Computer Clubhouse" teaches children of low income families computer skills for computer animation, graphic design, composing and editing, as a means to close the digital divide in our society. An introduction to robotics is also included in this program.

In the outer gardens of the museum, a real Boeing 720 aircraft (without actual function, fuel, electricity or engines) is present to teach children the basics of aeronautics. The airliner was donated by Avianca (the biggest airline in Colombia) in the mid 1980s.

The museum also features a room with a small representation of a city's roads to teach children traffic signs and behaviour while driving or walking on the streets

External links

• Museo de los Niños de Bogotá