Children's Creativity Museum — Attraction in San Francisco

The Children's Creativity Museum has engaging exhibits for people of all ages. The CCM (formerly Zeum) is located right in the middle of downtown San Francisco, next to restaurants, a fabulous playground, ice skating rink, vintage carousel and other museums such as SFMoMA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the future Mexican Museum in San Francisco.

After rebranding in 2011, the museum expanded its Early Childhood program by adding interactive music and storytelling sessions called Early Birdles in the mornings and afternoons. However, it is still a great place for wide range of ages (including parents) from the Animation Studio, where guests can build clay characters and create stop motion videos, to the Music Studio where kids and sing, dance, dress up and record their favorite song. All the videos are able to be downloaded at home and shared with friends and family.

The latest development is the Innovation Lab where youth are exposed to the idea of open ended brainstorming, prototyping and working with limited materials to build inspiring artworks designed to creatively solve problems. This area hosts innovators of the month who host workshops that introduce children to computer programming, robots, paper circuits and the latest technology seen at today's maker-faires.

All this plus sensory tables, construction spaces and daily art workshops makes this space a place where kids can learn and have fun at the same time! If you are just visiting SF, looking to plan an interactive birthday party or if you are a teacher in the Bay Area you will enjoy the variety of activities and the facilitation by CCM educators in this dynamic space.

-Monika Lea (Current...

Recommended age group- 2-12 years Ticket Price- $12.95 for adults as well as kids Carousel regular ticket price -$4 per person.

Money Saving Tip # 1 - If you have another Bay Area Museum’s yearly membership card, carry it with you. If it falls under their network, you get 50% off on your ticket price for all members. Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose is in their network for sure. That’s the card I used for my discounted tickets.

Money Saving Tip # 2- Do not buy the carousel ticket directly outside. Go inside the museum, buy your entry ticket and get $1 off per carousel ticket.

Timing: The museum shut at 4 pm on Sunday (when we visited) but the carousel ride shut down at 5 pm.

Walking distance from Powell BART station- 6 minutes

Creativity and Innovation galore: From making an animation video with our clay and wire models to animating paper cutouts, from solving the mystery box challenge and building something interesting to making robots demolish and draw....we loved it all!

Our favorite activity: It was surely the one next to the entrance. We colored and scanned our pictures. They were dropped on to a gigantic screen and came to life. Loved it!

This place is full of innovative, interesting and fun activities for parents and kids. Must visit in...

Can be fun for toddlers, boring for kids over 6 y.o. We came with 2 kids, 4 and 10...

Staff is nice and helpful.

This place is small, with some diy activities that can be easily done at home.

If your kid never experienced or played with playdo, ipad and robots, a sampler instrument, drawings,... it could be a nice first timer experience on a cold or rainy day in SF. But for us, we did it and will never return.

We had fun with the playdo stopmotion movie studio activity, that’s all...

The coding studio had several glitches and communication problems... some robots didn’t work properly...

The music studio was a joke, just one tiny sampler (no recording mode) with just a push button activity, a touch screen on the side of the room to make and record a beat sequence. A long waiting line to put a costume and record a video clip... and two small steel drums... no educational activity on how to produce and record music, no sessions with several/many instruments... really disappointing.

They have a nice indoor carousel but you need to pay extra fees to do it. This thing should be free after seeing the lack and the quality of their activities.

Overall, an overpriced/expensive,...