On the Edge of Your Seat
At the end of last month, Children’s Museum Board Members gathered at the Museum for a Board retreat. How do you get to know your fellow Board Chairs? By dividing into teams and having a “chair” contest of course! A MAKESHOP Challenge was presented to the group: Divide into teams of six and create a meaningful chair using a container…
Building a chair with the Board
Messy tables, goofy chairs, and lots of smiles… We held our annual Board Retreat for our Board Members and Directors of the Museum on October 24. The MAKESHOP team challenged them to “create a place to sit” using found and recycled materials. Everyone was split into four teams with one Teaching Artist to serve as a coach and spent thirty…
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…
SparkTruck Pit Stop
We had some amazing guests visit the Museum from Stanford University in sunny California. Jason, Didi and Eugene have spent the summer traveling across the United States in a mobile workshop dubbed the SparkTruck. Check it out! Along the way, they have been stopping at museums, community centers, events, and parks… Anywhere they can find. Their truck is full of various…
Making MAKESHOP
A couple of days ago, we hosted a “Making MAKESHOP” workshop. Participants of the workshop visited from Museums and other institutions from around the country. All of them were interested in developing a maker space of their own. We decided to share some of our secrets with them. Over the course of two days, we played, talked, asked and answered…
A Musical Field Trip
More exploration of sound and music in the month of August… I recently took a trip to the Bayernhof Museum outside of Pittsburgh. The Museum is located in a lovely old mansion and houses a eclectic collection of various musical machines and devices. Many of them dated as far back as the 1800s. I was given an amazing tour and…
MakerBot in MAKESHOP
We have a new toy in MAKESHOP — a MakerBot Replicator 3D printer! It’s on loan to us from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and we finally broke it out to play with it! Calling this machine a “printer” isn’t entirely accurate: this isn’t a printer like the one on the corner of your desk or even…
Welcome to MAKESBURGH
I came in to work a couple of days ago to find an entire half of MAKESHOP covered in amazing cardboard structures, such as cars, boats, buildings and bridges. We’ve tried to make a cardboard town in the past, but this one is easily the most extensive. Visitors seemed to be more invested in their projects if they know that…
Katz in the MAKESHOP
Every year, the Museum hosts a team building night for the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business. The graduate students entering the program utilized the entire Museum for a wide range of events and competitions. This year, MAKESHOP was the location for boat building. Students had to work as a team to construct boats using a limited amount of…
Our Floor Loom
Our floor loom has been around since we opened MAKESHOP last fall. I’m not sure why it took so long for me to write about it in our blog, but maybe it just took the right visitor to inspire me. “It caught my eye,” is what I was told by one of our teenage visitors. He spent over an hour…