Breeze Creative, a leading interactive product company creating innovative installations that combine technology, play, and education, has worked with the ICR Discovery Center in Dallas to develop engaging, hands-on activities that inspire children and families to explore science through play, creativity, and discovery.
The museum, run by the Institute for Creation Research, examines science and Earth history through a biblical lens. It features exhibits on topics such as the Global Flood, Grand Canyon, Mount St. Helens, fossils, dinosaurs, and astronomy.
Its method blends traditional storytelling with interactive displays and immersive experiences to captivate visitors of all ages.
The ICR Discovery Center collaborated with Breeze Creative to introduce three interactive experiences: Animated Sandbox, Draw Alive, and Build Alive.
This series of hands-on activities provides younger visitors with a direct way to engage with some of the major scientific stories being explored around them.
Animated Sandbox
Breeze Creative's Animated Sandbox, in the Global Flood exhibit, lets children shape mountains, valleys, and other terrain with their hands in real time.
As they modify the landscape, the projection updates instantly, illustrating topography and how landforms relate to water. For young visitors, ideas that may be challenging to grasp from static models or graphic panels become tangible and easy to understand through direct manipulation.
Breeze Creative's Animated Sandbox lets children shape mountains, valleys, and other terrain with their hands.
Image courtesy of Breeze Creative
"It gives children the opportunity to shape mountains and valleys with their own hands," the ICR Discovery Center team explains.
"Instead of simply reading about the effects of the global Flood, even our youngest guests can interact with these ideas in a way that is easy to understand."
The experience also encourages repeat play by letting children experiment with various shapes, change the terrain, and instantly see the results. This transforms a complex geological idea into an engaging, exploratory activity. Creativity is integrated into the exhibit.
The ICR Discovery Center also uses Animated Sandbox in its Mount St. Helens exhibit. Mount St. Helens offers an engaging setting for an interactive landscape experience. The 1980 eruption significantly altered the landscape, and the exhibit uses this site to demonstrate geological processes.
The Animated Sandbox enables children to recreate that transformation firsthand. By manipulating the sand, visitors can form mountains, valleys, and other structures while instantly viewing the digital visualisation.
This activity offers a hands-on and visual approach to understanding how landscapes can undergo dramatic changes.
Draw Alive
Nearby, Draw Alive offers a unique approach to visitor engagement. Guests draw their own images, which are then animated and integrated into a digital environment. In the Global Flood exhibit, children's drawings can swim across the screen, linking their creativity to the museum's themes of biodiversity and life.
For kids, it starts with a simple act: drawing something. But when their artwork is animated and displayed in the exhibit, they become active participants in the story.
With Draw Alive, visitors' drawings are animated and integrated into a digital environment
Image courtesy of Breeze Creative
The ICR Discovery Center sees this as an opportunity to help young guests engage with the diversity of life showcased throughout the exhibit.
"Children's creativity goes on display as their creations swim across the screen," the museum team says, giving young visitors a playful way to engage with the story of life and biodiversity.
This example shows how interactive technology can change the visitor's role from observer to active contributor.
Build Alive
At the Build Alive interactive table in the Grand Canyon exhibit, children experience another form of hands-on discovery. Build Alive is a cooperative tabletop activity that lets visitors assemble objects and creatures from digital parts.
Build Alive is an interactive tabletop game where visitors can assemble objects and creatures using digital parts
Image courtesy of Breeze Creative
This activity complements the exhibit's focus on the Grand Canyon. While parents explore the exhibit's scientific and geological details, younger visitors can create marine creatures linked to the museum's interpretation of Earth's pre-Flood oceans.
This setup allows families to engage with the same topic at different levels. Adults can study the scientific information, while children enjoy creative building and play.
Such flexibility is especially important in family museums, where visitors of different ages bring varying knowledge and attention spans.
Making museum content accessible
Across all three installations, a shared design principle is evident: interaction helps make complex topics easier to understand.
The Global Flood exhibit features Animated Sandbox to illustrate landscape changes and Draw Alive to involve visitors with biodiversity. Build Alive offers younger guests a creative way to engage with the Grand Canyon exhibit, while another Animated Sandbox lets visitors explore geological processes through Mount St. Helens.
Each experience employs a different type of interaction—shaping, drawing, building—but all aim to promote learning through active participation.
The Animated Sandbox helps visitors learn about Mount St Helens in a hands-on way
Image courtesy of Breeze Creative
This approach suits family audiences. Children might not understand detailed geological explanations but grasp the link between landscape change and immediate results. Young visitors may skip reading exhibit panels but enjoy experimenting with interactive landscapes or watching their drawings come to life.
Breeze Creative's partnership with the ICR Discovery Center showcases how interactive technology enhances, rather than replaces, traditional museum interpretation.
It adds an extra level of engagement, enabling children to explore the same themes their parents and older siblings experience through exhibit graphics, artefacts, models, and scientific explanations.
The result is a more flexible family experience: visitors can approach a subject through reading, observation, conversation, creativity, or hands-on experimentation.
Last month, Breeze Creative announced the launch of Magic Painter, an interactive attraction that merges digital creativity, artificial intelligence, and large-scale projection to offer collaborative art experiences.
