YouthALIVE and Scratch
YouthALIVE is an after school club for middle schoolers that takes place at the Museum. A few weeks ago, we encouraged the students to do some simple digital programming projects. The students explored with 3D printing, our EggBot, and Scratch. Scratch (you can access their website here) is an amazing program developed by MIT. Scratch is a a great way…
MAKEnight, April 4
MAKEnight is an amazing event held at the Museum. It is an after-hours event that lets adults (and only adults) play and explore in the Museum. The event has been a huge success over the past couple of months. We decided to make this latest MAKEnight a little bit different from the others. Typically, we only have attendees explore and…
Dream Flight Adventures
MAKESHOP was recently transformed into an interactive spaceship. Gary Gardner and his Dream Flight Adventures prototype returned to MAKESHOP for another day of playtesting with our visitors. He has already playtested his program at the Museum and a post describing that visit can be found here. He brought with him a newer version of the flight simulator software that he…
Harrison, the teacher
Harrison is a regular visitor to the Museum and has been mentioned before in this blog here. A couple of days ago, he visited MAKESHOP with an agenda. He needed help soldering some components. I can certainly help someone solder something, but Harrison really helped me understand what it means to turn your imagination into reality. Harrison planned on creating…
Typeface Design Drop-in Workshop
This was originally posted without the link to the font! Oops! Here’s the updated post! On two different recent Saturday afternoons we invited visitors to help us create a typeface — or nice looking collection of letters, numbers and symbols, like a comma or question mark — that we are going to turn into a font, or tool we can use…
Meet a Maker!
If you’ve visited the MAKESHOP on a weekend, chances are you’ve met and created with Allison! Name/ Nickname: Alison, but some of my friends and family call me Ali or Al. Favorite color: Hot pink! (And green) How long have you been working at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh? I started working in MAKESHOP in August 2012 but I’ve been helping…
Thinking About Typeface Design for Kids
Are you feeling inspired by our typeface design project? Do you want to work on your design skills at home? Here are some ideas for what to look for, what to notice and how to begin considering typography and typeface design in your everyday life.
Indian Scouts and shopbots
I had the opportunity to teach a Saturday workshop about electricity to a group of Indian Scouts. The group consisted of fifteen kindergartners and fifteen dads. I’m not sure who had more fun… me, the kids, or the dads. I think the dads did. I gave the group the challenge to use some motors and batteries to make something… anything. As usual,…
Interactive Fiction
We’ve been running a series of Sunday afternoon demonstrations of computer programming using Inform 7, which is a programming language for creating stories that you can play like a game. Visitors learned about using nouns and verbs to navigate story games, then about how to write code to make their very own story worlds. We used an online version of Inform…
Youth invade MAKESHOP
On February 22nd, we held our second Youth Maker Night. This was an after-hours event with a lot of tweens and teens, and no parents. We offered some new activities for the youth to try, including felting, recycled derby cars, e-textiles, tinkering with motors, and a demonstration of a 3D printer. It took the kids awhile to ease into the…