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Because “making” can be hard to define, at least in the MAKEHSOP context, finding books that are a good fit for our visitors can be a challenge. Last summer, fellow Teaching Artist (and fellow librarian) Henry and I started picking new books to add to the MAKESHOP book collection so we could begin our Maker Story Time program. In this blog series, I’ll share some of the ways in which we go through t

Recently Paul, a former educator at the Museum, came back to visit for a day. Paul moved to Boston right before MAKESHOP officially opened. He was around for the prototyping of MAKESHOP and was pivotal in its inception several years ago. At some point during his time at the Museum Paul started working on a DIY guitar. While he was visiting with me a couple of weeks ago the two of us discovered the guitar in our basem

Throughout the winter months we have been doing a lot of medieval themed programming in MAKESHOP.  We made capes and crowns and castles.  The one thing we were missing was a dragon.  So one morning I decided that I was going to make one out of cardboard.  I was just about finished with the head and neck of the dragon when a teenager named Gabe stepped into the workshop.  I invited him to help me work on the dragon.  

Attachment Lesson 0: Don’t unattach it in the first place! Plenty of creations are made through processes which take away material from a big piece.  Nothing is added, and therefore nothing has to be attached.  These processes which take away material are called “subtractive”, while processes which add and attach more pieces are “additive”. Sculptures in stone are a great example of subt

A couple of weeks ago I was given the chance to teach a group of Pre-K teachers about Scratch Jr.  You can learn more about Scratch Jr. from a previous post by Molly here.  This was one of the most fun professional developments that I ever taught.  The plan was to introduce the teachers to a couple of creative programs that could be used in their classrooms.  Scratch Jr. took center stage.  The program is really intu

This post is part of a series that will explore making in elementary, middle, and high schools. The series is part of the Kickstarting Making in Schools project in which Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh will choose six schools to integrate making along with using Kickstarter, an online crowdfunding platform, to raise necessary funds for their projects. by Adam Nye, Winchester Thurston School Educators are looking to m

  ​​When visitors sew for the first time, they often worry about the tools, like how to thread a needle and whether they’re going to poke themselves with the needle once it’s threaded. Once they start, however, they shift their focus to making a stitch. There are lots of ways to make a stitch, but there are two stitches that new sewers tend to start with: the running stitch and the whip stitch. Both

Here in MAKESHOP, our go-to programming environment is Scratch, developed by MIT. Here are some basics. This post will delve more deeply into how a character or object on the screen (sprite) can be made to move in Scratch. Below are three ways to do it. Each of these programs has only one sprite, so it should be straightforward to see how these are working.   In the first example, the helicopter moves up, down,

Do you know how MAKESHOP started? It didn’t just open it’s doors and look like the way it does now. The road to MAKESHOP is a long story itself, but I bring up history to raise an important question: If you don’t happen to have a museum, where do you make things? Let’s talk about making at home. What do you need to start? In MAKESHOP we have staff, tools, materials, furniture and lots of curio