Mineta airport opens new play space for traveling kids
Anyone who’s flown with young kids knows it can be a heavy lift to keep them occupied in the time between the TSA security lines and boarding. Some resort to screens, others to books and some just let the kids stare out the windows at the arriving and departing jets.
Mineta San Jose International Airport is giving parents another option. It’s the Zoom Zone, a 600 squarefoot educational play space that opened Wednesday between Gates 24 and 25 in Terminal B.
This isn’t the airport’s first foray into a kid-friendly area — remember the iPal Playground with its kinda creepy robots a few years back? — but the Zoom Zone has more going for it because it was designed in partnership with the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, an institution that knows a lot about kids.
Decorated in the same purple shade as CDM’s home base in downtown San Jose, the Zoom Zone will satisfy kids’ interest in things that fly — whether it’s a bird, a butterfly or an airplane. Children can make a Monarch butterfly’s wings flap, climb all over a bird’s outstretched wings or take the controls of a biplane. The “Alphabet Plane” has a series of windows that matches up letters with place names to teach kids about cities around the United States (Detroit, Reno and New York) and the world (Guadalajara, Tokyo and London). And when the shade is pulled up, they’ll uncover an image that represents that place.
The Children’s Discovery Museum also imported a version of the Pin Screen, one of its most popular features, which lets kids push on plastic pins to create their own art — at least until another kid comes along and makes art of their own.
Zoom, which is based in downtown San Jose, provided a $240,000 gift for the project, which was also the recipient of more than $1.2 million in free and discounted services from the airport, general contractor Hensel Phelps and construction subcontractors.