Makeshop™

A creative space to play with ideas, explore materials, and tinker with tools.

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

Animation and a lot of jewelry

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Michael and Katie are two kids who really took full advantage of MAKESHOP.  They spent some time getting introduced to two different projects, mainly stop-motion animation and jewelry making.  After an introduction, they set out to create several amazing and varied projects.  Katie spent some time making felt balls out of wool and then proceeded to make necklace using her…

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CD Spin Art

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Here is a great example of a visitor taking an existing exhibit piece and making it so much more fun.  This visitor turned our circuit blocks into an art project.  We were exploring the different circuit blocks and when we got to the block that contains an old CD drive I was asked if we had any CDs to test…

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Learning from teachers

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We don’t just serve children at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, we are also a resource for teachers.  We offer many professional development workshops for teachers.  Recently, we held a workshop to discuss the different options for early childhood educators to use the Museum.  We offered teachers an opportunity to reflect on certain areas of the Museum and how these…

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Chester’s field trip

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We get a lot of interesting visitors to the Museum every day.  This was the first time that a raccoon decided to visit.  This particular raccoon was from a classroom that gives each student an opportunity to take something home, and sometimes it’s a puppet or a stuffed animal.  The family is then encouraged to take the creature somewhere interesting…

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A classroom visit

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I recently had the privilege of completing a residency at a kindergarten class at the Environmental Charter School.  The class was exploring simple machines, such as pulleys, gears, inclined planes, wheels and axles, etc.  I was asked to help plan and co-teach with their teacher, Jen.  I always enjoy visiting schools.  Typically, classes come to the Museum to explore and…

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Puppets and technology

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How do you mix paper bag crafts with technology?  Our usual answer to a question like that is “put a light on it!”  Basically, we tried to figure out what we could add to a paper bag puppet to make it more “techy.”  Rebecca created a very cool example that combines a paper bag with an electronic circuit.  When you…

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Simple machines in MAKESHOP

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I recently had the opportunity to work with a kindergarten class from the Environmental Charter School.  We had a partnership with them that created a residency for two of our teaching artists to visit the school to plan and co-teach lessons.  Nick and I were asked to help with the first grade and a kindergarten classroom.  Nick helped the first…

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Puppet Prototype

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  Each month, our staff picks a programmatic theme for MAKESHOP that helps us to decide on what activities to provide.  Our theme in MAKESHOP for the month of February is puppets.  We decided to explore different ways to make puppets by reimagining recycled materials, sewing finger puppets and cloth puppets, building marionettes  and playing with shadows puppets.  As always, we will integrate digital…

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Make some noise

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The students from the Museum’s after school program, YouthALIVE!, visited MAKESHOP a couple of weeks ago to work on a build challenge.  They spent three days trying to design and build something that made noise.  As always, it is a fun experience to work with this group of kids. They created some amazing and inventive projects over the course of…

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Explaining Things Through Animation

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I have been having a good time playing around with animation in MAKESHOP.  Our stop-motion program allows you to create a simple movie by taking pictures of object while moving them around. A couple of days ago we had some of our conductive play-doh out for visitors to explore.  The conductive play-doh acts as a conductor that can be used…

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