Stop-Motion Joke
Michael has been to MAKESHOP before. His favorite thing to do is stop-motion animation. He came in a couple of days ago and couldn’t find the stop-motion computer. We move things around a lot in MAKESHOP, so I showed him where the computer was residing and he got right to work. His first animation was about the “fiscal cliff,” but…
Repurposing Jeans
It was around three o’clock in the afternoon when Katie came into MAKESHOP with an old pair jeans in tote. She explained to me that the jeans had holes in them and her mom wanted to throw them out. Instead, Katie brought the jeans to the Museum to turn them into something new. Katie has been to MAKESHOP before, so…
Textile Design Crash Course
Lea and I, both Teaching Artists, ran Textile Design Crash Courses for two different groups of visiting Winchester Thurston high school students on special day-long field trips, one on May 20th and another on May 21st. Asked to come up with a 4.5 hour workshop of our choosing, we jumped at the chance to work with older kids in a…
An Abstract Theme
“Make something that flows” This was the challenge that we presented to visitors a couple of weeks ago. As facilitators, it was our challenge to document what visitors did when given the challenge. Typically themes in MAKESHOP revolve around less abstract ideas like 3D objects or light, but mMake FLOW. What does that even mean? I spent about an hour…
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…
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…
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…