Makeshop™

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

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

Interactive Fiction

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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…

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Youth invade MAKESHOP

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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…

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Make something that rolls

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The Museum’s YouthALIVE program visits MAKESHOP once a month.  YouthALIVE is an after-school program of Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.  The group is made up of middle school students from a school across the street.  Lately, we’ve been giving the students a challenge to complete.  This week, we asked them to create something that rolls.  The students had three days to…

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Make some noise

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The students from the Museum’s after school program, YouthALIVE!, visited MAKESHOP a couple of weeks ago to work on a build challenge.  They spent three days trying to design and build something that made noise.  As always, it is a fun experience to work with this group of kids. They created some amazing and inventive projects over the course of…

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Youth Alive: Survival Kit Project

Over the past several weeks, students from the Museum’s YouthALIVE after school program worked on a very interesting design challenge.  The kids were tasked with creating a “survival kit” for someone stranded on a deserted island.  They were afforded time in the MakeShop to design and create the objects for their kits.  The students worked in teams and were given…

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