Makeshop™

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

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

Meet a Maker!

If you’ve visited the MAKESHOP on a weekend, chances are you’ve met and created with Allison! Name/ Nickname: Alison, but some of my friends and family call me Ali or Al. Favorite color: Hot pink! (And green) How long have you been working at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh? I started working in MAKESHOP in August 2012 but I’ve been helping…

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Meet a Maker!

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Meet our fearless leader and MAKESHOP Manager, Adam! Name: Adam Favorite color: Yellow How long have you been working at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh? August 2010 When did you know you were a maker? As a child, I would help my grandparents to cook, sew, paint, fix things up, and do little odd jobs around the house. I got a sewing…

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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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Maker Education Initiative

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Are you 18-22 years old and interested in maker culture? Do you know a young adult who loves to tinker and enjoys working with children? We’re excited to announce a great new opportunity for this summer! MAKESHOP at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is partnering with the Maker Education Initiative, a program linked to MAKE Magazine, to launch the Maker Corps…

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A family’s prototype

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Here is a quick story about an amazing pair of makers that spent an entire Saturday working on a single idea, which was “What can you do with a mousetrap?” When I joined this father and son team, they were already under production with their creation: a mousetrap car.  Apparently the dad saw that we had a couple of mousetraps…

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Meet a Maker!

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Meet Christian, the master of puns! Christian is one of our MAKESHOP Teaching Artists. Name: Christian Favorite color: Red (and black) How long have you been working at The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh? September 2011 When did you know you were a maker? I don’t think I identified myself as a “Maker” until recently. I’ve always made, tinkered, and disassembled things though. I…

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Monsters in MAKESHOP

Adam King is a really cool maker with a really cool hobby.  He experiments with special effects and creates amazing monster masks and puppets.  It was so much fun to see MAKESHOP full of creepy monsters a couple of Saturdays ago.  We weren’t sure if kids would get scared about it, but Adam is so inviting that almost everyone was…

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A plethora of projects…

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Augustine and his sister were already hard at work in a corner of the MAKESHOP when I came back from break.  They were working on two intricate projects: a wooden truck and a tadpole.  These two projects were brought to my attention because Augustine wanted to cut a piece of scrap wood to a certain size.  I helped him with…

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Monster Mash

A guest maker, Adam King, who makes theatrical monster masks, visited MAKESHOP in October to sculpt one of his awesome creatures! Amazing to think that it started as a lump of clay. Here it is finished! And here are some of his friends.

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Goofing off at Maker Faire

We hosted the second annual Pittsburgh Mini Maker Faire last week.  It was a lovely day full of lovely people.  I could go on in great detail about all the gadgets and amazing inventions on display.  Instead, what I noticed most during the day was a sense of goofiness.  Everyone was genuinely having fun. We had so much fun at…

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