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…
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,…
CD Spin Art
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…
Kai’s Invention
Kai is a regular visitor of the Museum. He is the kind of visitor who really enjoys tinkering with anything and everything. On this particular day, we were experimenting with making light-up cards using copper tape and LEDs. Kai was very interested in exploring what could be done with the copper tape and a piece of paper. He already had…
Glowing Bots!
Every month we have a theme that helps us to decide on new activities for MAKESHOP. We spent the month of December making projects and exploring materials that GLOW. We had glow-in-the-dark fabric, UV LEDs, lots of holiday lights, light painting, and some glow-in-the-dark paint. I had the brilliant idea to combine some of the GLOW activities with a ShopBot…
Aircraft Carrier
Joseph was a really fun kid to meet. He was one of those visitors who seemed to fit right in at MAKESHOP. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to create, but he came to a decision after he spent some time tinkering and exploring the materials. He first tinkered around with lighting up small LEDs with batteries. He eventually…
Explaining Things Through Animation
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…
Youth Maker Night
In November, MAKESHOP hosted the first ever Youth Maker Night. Kids, ages 10 to 15, were given the opportunity to visit MAKESHOP after hours without their parents. We had a lot of electricity activities for the youth to make things and explore. The circuit blocks were out with some conductive play-doh. We also had LED lights and conductive tape, and…
Light Painting Results
We have finally gone beyond the prototyping stage of Light Painting. Rebecca explained a lot about the process in this blog post. I have had some more time to set up the workshop side of MAKESHOP to better facilitate light painting with our visitors. The exploration of this technique is really fun. I have had kids and adults of all…
Activated Origami
This was really cool workshop taught by one of our favorite guest makers, Sibel Deren Guler. Visitors were able to explore and learn how to create several origami projects. They were then encouraged by Deren and me to add lights and motors to their creations. This was the first time I witnessed activated origami and I loved it. These special…