Marbles Kids Museum is a nonprofit children's museum

Museum

A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...

 located in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina

Raleigh, North Carolina

Raleigh is the capital and the second largest city in the state of North Carolina as well as the seat of Wake County. Raleigh is known as the "City of Oaks" for its many oak trees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city's 2010 population was 403,892, over an area of , making Raleigh...

 in the Moore Square Historic District

Moore Square Historic District

The Moore Square Historic District is a registered historic district located in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, the district is centered around Moore Square, one of two surviving four-acre parks from Raleigh's original 1792 plan...

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Its mission is to "inspire imagination, discovery and learning through extraordinary adventures in play and larger-than-life IMAX experiences." It was created through the merger in 2007 of two existing children's museums: Exploris and Playspace.

Exhibits

Marbles Kids Museum offers "unique hands-on interactive experiences that inspire children to be creative thinkers and active learners." Its permanent exhibits are intended for children under 10 years of age and include Around Town, Splash!, IdeaWorks, Power2Play, and Moneypalooza. Daily activities and numerous special events are organized around Marbles five core initiatives: 1) Be Healthy, Be Active; 2) Create, Innovate; 3) Go Global; 4) Build Your Brain; and 5) Grow up Green. Marbles offers affordable daily admission and annual memberships and access programs for children from low-income families.

IMAX

The Wachovia IMAX

IMAX

IMAX is a motion picture film format and a set of proprietary cinema projection standards created by the Canadian company IMAX Corporation. IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems...

 Theatre is North Carolina's only Giant Screen certified 3D theater and features a screen five stories high, and a sound system capable of supplying 12,000 watts of surround sound. The theater plays short educational IMAX documentaries, along with feature films that also appear in regular movie theaters.

History

Marbles predecessor Exploris opened in 1999 as a $39.5 million state-of-the-art interactive global learning center. While praised for its architecture and lofty educational goals, attendance never met expectations. Playspace was an interactive children's museum aimed at preschool through early elementary age children. The move to the former Exploris space is the third move to a larger location in the museum's history. Playspace was originally located two blocks south of Marbles in City Market. It remained there until the late 1990s, moving to 410 Glenwood Avenue in a former dairy building. The non-profit museum received some funding from Wake County but was largely funded by corporate sponsorships of individual exhibits as well as the $5 per person admission price and memberships. In the summer of 2007, the two museums closed. Playspace moved into Exploris' building, and a new name for the combined museums was chosen. Marbles was selected to reflect the museum's unique 2-story stainless steel wall grid inset with over 1.2 million marbles. The name was released to the public on September 29, 2007, the same day the new museum opened to the public.

External links

• Marbles Kids Museum
• More About Marbles Kids Museum in Raleigh, NC