Owens's small museum was popular enough that by 1951 it expanded into the Children's Nature Center, opened adjacent to the new Freedom Park, focused on bringing families and nature together. In 1965 it added a planetarium - the era when planetariums were everywhere because Sputnik had made the night sky an American obsession. By the 1970s it had been renamed the Charlotte Nature Museum, and the Cold War space race had created a national appetite for hands-on science education. Charlotte's community approved funding for a new comprehensive science and technology center, locating it on North Tryon Street partly to draw development into Uptown and partly because that was where the population could most easily reach it. The new museum opened in 1981 under the name Discovery Place, with Russell Peithman as its first director.

The Charlotte Observer IMAX Dome Theater opened in 1991, the first giant-screen motion picture theater in the Carolinas. It is an OMNIMAX configuration - the projector throws upward onto a hemispherical screen that wraps your peripheral vision, so the images do not just play in front of you, they surround you. The Observer paid for the naming rights; the screen has shown documentaries about coral reefs, dinosaurs, space, the Antarctic, and any number of other places people prefer to visit at sixty feet tall rather than in person. The dome remains the largest of its kind in the region. Watching a film there is one of the few experiences a museum can offer that a phone cannot replicate.

By the late 2000s the building - which had been ambitious in 1981 and expanded in 1986 - was tired. Charlotte underwent an eighteen-month renovation finishing in 2010 that cost $31.6 million and rebuilt the exhibits around concepts more current with twenty-first-century museum thinking: open exploration, fewer single-purpose displays, more flexibility for traveling exhibitions. The Carol Grotnes Belk Education and Parking Complex had already been completed in 1996 to handle the growing crowds. The 2010 renovation made room for the kinds of programs - teacher training, school partnerships, public health initiatives - that turn a museum from an attraction into a piece of civic infrastructure.

Discovery Place is now four institutions under one nonprofit. The original site rebranded as Discovery Place Science in 2016 during the organization's seventieth anniversary. The Charlotte Nature Museum near Freedom Park became Discovery Place Nature - butterfly pavilion, live native species, the kind of place where small children meet their first turtle. Discovery Place Kids opened in Huntersville in 2010 and in Rockingham in 2013 - both designed for the young-child end of the museum-going age range, where learning through play is the entire pedagogy. The Discovery Place Education Studio at the Bank of America STEM Center for Career Development opened on the Uptown campus in 2014 to train teachers, because exhibits matter less if the educators using them are under-prepared.

Science museums face a strange challenge: kids can access far more scientific content on their phones in a minute than a museum can put in a hundred exhibits. What phones cannot do is let a kid stand in front of a real tornado simulator, watch real liquid nitrogen flash a balloon into a frozen wrinkle, hear the actual sound that fills a dome when the screen erupts into a thirty-foot wave. Hands-on means muscle memory; muscle memory means retention. Discovery Place has spent eight decades figuring out how to make Charlotte's children remember that science is something you do, not something you watch. The Cecil Street schoolteacher would, on her best days, probably approve.