The Museum of Discovery and Science in downtown Fort Lauderdale is opening two major permanent exhibits on Friday, Oct. 30: the finished Build a Better World: The Future Begins with You gallery and a rebuilt FPL Storm Center where visitors run a mock hurricane power restoration. Both arrive as MODS heads into its 50th anniversary, a celebration the museum is spreading across 2026 and 2027, and both are included with regular admission.

A 7,500-square-foot gallery, finished

If you have been to MODS at 401 SW 2nd St. in the past year, you have seen the first half of Build a Better World: the Everglades Theater, where an AI otter named Lilly walks kids through South Florida ecosystems, the Mangrove Mangal Climber, and living Atlantic and Indo-Pacific coral reef habitats. The Oct. 30 opening completes the permanent gallery, which covers 7,500 square feet.

The new half is organized around four traits the museum wants kids to practice: caring, cooperation, critical thinking and confidence. In practice that means hands-on decision games. Children design a city meant to hold up against a changing climate while accounting for both the people and the animals living in it, then watch what their choices do and try again. A Solutions Showcase puts real local engineering on display, including 3D-printed living seawalls (structures built to give marine life a foothold while protecting the shoreline) and newer approaches to air conditioning. LEGO Build the Change stations ask kids to build a stronger neighborhood and explain why they built it that way.

The part most likely to outlast the visit is the Pledge Wall. It takes what a visitor learned about themselves in the gallery and suggests specific local actions, then lets them sign up by email for a real volunteer outing run by a partner in the Broward Hub for Resilience Education: dune restoration, tree plantings, beach cleanups. It turns a Saturday at the museum into a reason to show up at the beach the following month.

The gallery also doubles as a workplace. MODS is staffing it partly with EcoExplorers, a paid internship for 80 Broward high school students who will run programs and work the floor alongside visiting children. The money behind the build is substantial: a $2.5 million lead grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., plus a long list of local backers including the Community Foundation of Broward, JM Family Enterprises and the Broward Cultural Division.

The Storm Center puts you in the utility's chair

The reimagined FPL Storm Center keeps what generations of Broward kids remember (the hurricane simulator that blasts you with storm-force wind, a 10-foot tornado vortex you can put your hand into, the plasma sphere) and adds three new sections: the Command Center, Get Prepared and the Hurricane Simulation Lab.

The Command Center is the headline. Visitors take in forecasts, satellite imagery and drone footage, figure out where an outage is and why, then decide which restoration crews go where. Each call changes what happens next, so it plays more like a strategy game than a wall of panels. For anyone who has sat in the dark after a storm wondering why the street over got power first, it is a surprisingly clear look at how those decisions get made. Elsewhere, the Hurricane Simulation Lab lets kids build their own storm and make clouds, and a WSVN News Station set puts them in front of a camera to deliver the forecast.

The rebuild was paid for by a gift from the NextEra Energy Foundation, the corporate foundation tied to FPL and its parent company.

Fifty years, from the Discovery Center to the riverfront

MODS started in 1977 as The Discovery Center and moved in 1992 into its current building in the Arts and Science District, across from Esplanade Park on the New River. It now runs about 150,000 square feet of exhibits, an outdoor science park, a live animal collection, the Great Gravity Clock in the atrium and the AutoNation IMAX Theater.

The 50th anniversary calendar runs well into 2027, and most of it is built for families rather than donors:

  • Visit Lauderdale Science Festival, Saturday, Jan. 16, 2027. The fourth year of the festival, folded into the anniversary, with demonstrations and hands-on stations throughout the building. Free.
  • Birthday Parties for MODS, starting Friday, April 16, 2027, through spring and summer. Cake, music and dancing with mascots Joey and Spot. Free for members, included with admission for everyone else.
  • A Golden Luncheon, Friday, May 21, 2027. Individual tickets are $250.
  • A Golden Dinner, Saturday, Nov. 13, 2027, a seated private-home dinner that closes the celebration. Couples start at $5,000.

The first big anniversary-season event is next Friday, Oct. 23: the 30th Annual Wine, Spirits and Culinary Celebration, honoring Steve Halmos and Keith Koenig, who helped start it three decades ago. Tickets run $1,500 to $2,900. Note that MODS closes to regular visitors on the day of the wine event, so plan any weekday visit around it.

What it costs and when to go

MODS is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Residents of Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties get a Discovery Pass that covers the exhibits, live demonstrations, one HoloTheater show and one IMAX documentary: $26.50 for adults, $20 for kids 1 to 12 and $24.50 for seniors when bought online ahead of time (bring a photo ID with a tri-county address). Infants under a year and members get in free. Parking is in the city's Arts and Entertainment garage across SW 5th Avenue.

If you go before January, you also catch I AM WILD: A Charley Harper Exhibit, the traveling show built around the illustrator's bold, geometric animals, which stays through Jan. 11, 2027.

For families who have been treating MODS as a once-a-year rainy-day stop, Oct. 30 is a good excuse to go back. A museum that has been in Fort Lauderdale since 1977 is spending its anniversary adding things your kids have never seen, and one of them might send the whole family out to plant dunes on the beach a few weeks later.