Minnesota Children's Museum, Minneapolis

The Minnesota Children's Museum is a non-profit community organization located in Saint Paul, Minnesota, US. The Museum mission statement is "providing children with a fun, hands-on and stimulating environment to explore and discover". The Museum, in operation since 1981, embraces these core concepts: Early learning is the foundation for lifelong learning. Families are our children's first teachers. All children deserve a time and place to be children. Diverse perspectives enrich children's lives. Play is learning.

On December 12, 1981, the first children entered the original Children's Museum, known as "Minnesota's AwareHouse", in downtown Minneapolis. Attendance grew to 80,000, and the museum quickly outgrew the original space in downtown Minneapolis. In 1985, the Children's Museum moved to an old blacksmith's shop in Bandana Square, transforming dirt walls into 18,000 square feet (1,700 m2) of galleries. By the early 1990s, the museum's visitors and exhibits again outgrew the space in Bandana Square.

Plans to build an even bigger museum began. The doors to the Minnesota Children's Museum in downtown Saint Paul opened with 65,000 square feet (6,000 m2) of gallery and program space in September 1995. Three of the most popular exhibits moved from Bandana Square to the Minnesota Children's Museum in downtown St. Paul: Habitot®; the Crane (which moved to the World Works gallery), and the Maze (which moved to Earth World and became the giant anthill). Today, more than 6 million children and their families have visited the Museum.