On May 27th, the Omaha Children’s Museum will unveil its new Art Smart Center.
Lindy Hoyer, Executive Director for the museum, says when staff made the decision that they wanted to upgrade their creative arts offerings at the museum, one of the ideas that was brought up was ways to combine technology with the arts and creativity.
Hoyer says she didn’t want to put technology in the new center just for the sake of technology. She says she also didn’t want to mirror anything that kids could do at home with handheld devices.
The result of the search was a program called Sketch Town which not only encourages kids to stretch their imaginations, but also helps them connect with their individual artwork.
"There’s a big screen that’s interactive and it’s a cityscape so you can create a piece of the cityscape to add to it, whether that be a vehicle or a bird in flight, something like that that will be added to the cityscape. So you color that in and there’s a scanner and you scan it. When you scan that, it starts to appear and move across the screen.”
Hoyer says while the kids’ artwork is moving, a child can go up to their particular image, put their hand on it and redirect it to a different route.
It’s got an interactive as well as a creative component. The images stay up throughout the day with Sketch Town being reset each morning.
Other Art Smart Center areas include a larger space for face painting, a Tinker Lab and a paint window for open-ended painting.
For more information, the website is OCM.org.