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A wedding is a great excuse to make stuff. In the case of my recent matrimony there were a lot of hand made things. My wife and I (along with some other helpers) spent the last year making decorations, invitations and other essential wedding materials. It started off with the creation of our “save the date” announcements. These went through a couple of prototyping stages before we settled on a final produ

Sometimes we are asked to help better explain how different exhibits in the Museum work.  Recently the exhibit piece in question was Wooden Mirror by Daniel Rozin, located in a nook between our Garage exhibit and the Changing Exhibits Gallery. This interactive art piece is a lot of fun – it’s made up of a lot of different parts that work together to create an image of whatever is in front of it. We probab

Sometimes things break at our Museum. This particular case involved a computer with a broken power cord. This computer was designed to specifically run our Digital Dream Lab programming blocks station. Without this computer it meant that could not have the programming blocks out. Instead of just leaving a sign on the machine saying “broken, we are working on fixing this” we decided as a team to build a te

Every once and a while we decide to totally transform MAKESHOP to meet the needs of a specific activity. For the past couple of months we had been brainstorming some way to play around with ramps and “Rube Goldberg Machines” in our space. Around the end of December we were given a donation of hundreds of cardboard tubes. We took this as a sign that we should come up with some kind of ramp activity soon. O

A couple of weeks ago we let our visitors explore ramps on a very large scale. We cleared out a large space in MAKESHOP and let adults and kids explore with cardboard tubes, tape and ping pong balls. Photos don’t really do this activity justice. Below are several videos highlighting some of the more interesting creations during our ramp experiment. This was a ramp that I assembled with the help of several kids.

What can you do with a thousand flat refrigerator magnets?  That was the question I had when we received a donation of old magnets.  They were part of an advertising campaign from 2005 for a local theme park.  Sometimes it simply the shear number of a certain material that helps us develop an activity in MAKESHOP. I thought it would be cool to make patterns or pixel drawings using the magnets on one of our metal pegb