Dream it! Build it! is Boston Children’s Museum’s newest permanent exhibit. The design and execution of the exhibit represents a renewed dedication to the spirit of joy, imagination, and artistry that characterizes Boston Children’s Museum’s experiences.

It began with a desire to expand on the original vision for the venerable Construction Zone exhibit, visited and loved by more than a million children and caregivers over its 20-plus years in the space. The Museum’s exhibits team, led by Robin Meisner and Joel Reider, created a new space that broadened the way the Museum presents “construction” to offer children and caregivers the opportunity to explore construction, architecture, and engineering through creative problem-solving and play, and gain an understanding of the collaborative, community-focused sides of design and construction.

The exhibits team had four big ideas in mind:

1. Support children’s development of key skills of mind essential for life and work: problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, consideration of the needs of others, patience, and respect for oneself.
2. Help children, families, and caregivers understand how design choices affect the world around them, and that everyone can have a voice in the development of the built environment.
3. Create a space where children of all backgrounds, especially girls and children of color, see themselves as builders and creators.
4. Celebrate the thrill and delight of realizing “I can make something real with my own hands!” in a safe, imaginative environment.

To begin development of the exhibit, the team interviewed Museum visitors, and consulted an advisory board of construction, architecture, engineering, and design professionals that included women and people of color. They also explored existing research and practice around creating STEAM exhibits that engage girls and children of color. The team engaged with the community, inviting feedback on exhibit prototypes from children and families both inside and outside the Museum, and collaborating with youth and staff from Artists for Humanity and YouthBuild Boston—two local design and construction-focused organizations—to create artistic exhibit elements.

The result is an experience that encourages the entire family to dream, design, and build through hands-on, minds-on components that allow visitors to stretch their imagination, practice real-world skills, and envision how what we build affects the world around us.

At the heart of the exhibit is the Dream City, an always-in-motion interactive city, to which children can contribute their biggest, boldest ideas. From there, they can head over to Green Spaces, where they can use colorful blue and green blocks to build cities that incorporate nature. Design Challenge invites visitors to take on the perspective of someone else and design something based on that individual’s needs, while the Sensory Nooks challenge kids to think about how different design choices make them feel.

The Big Build Jobsite and other components featuring different trades, like Brick Builder and Magic Painter, let kids experiment and have fun with hands-on skills, tools, materials, and safety equipment. Johnny’s Workbench features bright, floral murals made by students at Artists for Humanity out of real tools, and gives kids a chance to practice using real hand tools.

Other components, like the dollhouse from the Museum’s Collection and the open walls of Peeled Away Layers in the Big Build, let kids see how different systems like wiring, plumbing, and roofing run through a building. With videos created for the exhibit and shared in Worker Profiles, visitors of all ages meet and get inspired by the work and multifaceted identities of real people in construction. For the youngest visitors, the Baby Builders area, one of the new Infant Nooks across the Museum, provides opportunities for children ages birth to 15 months to explore materials and develop and practice their fine motor skills—both developmentally appropriate ways for the youngest visitors to engage in the exhibit’s themes.

All of this comes together in an exhibit that reflects the true spirit of the Museum. Dream it! Build it! is an intentional combination of real-world tools, technology, and creativity that creates a fun, imaginative landscape of exploration for visitors of every age. It includes contributions from the Boston community, representing the Museum’s deep, lasting commitment to the city, and serves as a rededication of the Museum to its mission to create experiences that engage children and families in joyful discovery.