Discover Utah’s largest indoor prehistoric playground

In Thanksgiving Point’s newest venue, the combination of learning and play is cleverly molded into five stories of Jurassic Jungle.

As the largest indoor prehistoric playground in Utah, those who visit the Mountain America Jurassic Jungle will be immersed in a prehistoric-themed play, feeding T. rexes, jumping over hot lava and escaping danger down a five-story corkscrew slide.

Thanksgiving Point Co-Founder Alan Ashton credited the Pedagogy of Play — a term coined by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education — with being the blueprint for the seventh discovery center at Thanksgiving Point. POP focuses on teaching children through play.

Ashton said three objectives must be present for POP to work successfully: Purpose, agency and enjoyment.

This kind of play “releases a lot of the stress that our youth are under. If they’re just sitting around on screens doing the little games and so on, that will shorten their lifespan. The lethargic type of just sitting around all of the time is not good,” Ashton said Monday morning at the Jurassic Jungle ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“So, this is an opportunity for children to get in and to be anxiously engaged. They’ll learn to take turns. They’ll learn to do things together,” he added.

Visitors will be given interactive wristbands that track their progress as they play and complete missions. Little yellow beacons placed all over the playground scan the wristbands to follow a user’s activity.

“As you complete missions like feeding the hungry T. rex, you can go to our gift shop, and if you complete enough, you get to take home a prize,” Abby Allard, communications manager for Thanksgiving Point, told the Deseret News. At any point, guests can go to the checkpoint to check on their point progress.

Four times a year, a fresh story arc unfolds, offering guests an entirely new adventure and ensuring a unique, immersive experience with every visit.

“We’ve designed it so that we can change lights, and it will change what it looks like on the inside,” Allard said. “Using different kinds of paint, when you change the light color, it shows a very different image. So when we do another story arc,” the atmosphere of the playground changes.

The current mission, to help lost baby triceratops return to their mother, will be open to the public on Dec. 17 by reservation only.

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