Makeshop™

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

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

YouthALIVE and Scratch

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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…

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Typeface Design Drop-in Workshop

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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…

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Thinking About Typeface Design for Kids

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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.

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3D Modeling

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If you’re a frequent visitor to our space or this blog, you may know that we have a MakerBot Replicator. We pulled it out recently for Youth Maker Night, an event for older children and young teens. We figured it would be a fun thing to check out while people were snacking in between working on projects. Unfortunately, some of the printer settings were accidentally reset before the event…

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Animation in the MAKESHOP

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Each month, MAKESHOP decides on a theme to help us pick and develop activities. This month our theme is “time.” Stop-motion animation takes time to experience.  It also lets you manipulate the timing of pictures, so we decided to do some stop-motion animation this month. Our stop-motion machine got a little bit of an upgrade.  The controls are still housed…

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