Another Gear Idea
Derek, a new employee at the Museum and a local teacher in Pittsburgh, presented a great idea to me a couple of days ago. He wants to make a mechanical version of our circuit blocks. He thinks that it is important to utilize various types of gears to create blocks that visitors can connect together to further explore mechanization. To…
Indian Scouts and shopbots
I had the opportunity to teach a Saturday workshop about electricity to a group of Indian Scouts. The group consisted of fifteen kindergartners and fifteen dads. I’m not sure who had more fun… me, the kids, or the dads. I think the dads did. I gave the group the challenge to use some motors and batteries to make something… anything. As usual,…
CD Spin Art
Here is a great example of a visitor taking an existing exhibit piece and making it so much more fun. This visitor turned our circuit blocks into an art project. We were exploring the different circuit blocks and when we got to the block that contains an old CD drive I was asked if we had any CDs to test…
Chair + Lights = ?
The month of December is over and our GLOW theme is done, but that doesn’t mean that we are not still trying to add lights to anything and everything in MAKESHOP. After spending an entire month playing with lights and creating all kinds of switches, I decided that it would be really cool to make a chair that lights up…
Teenagers and Shopbots
The Museum sees a lot of visitors every week. Most of them are under five years old, but every week during the school year, a group of 6-8th grade students visit the Museum for our after-school program, YouthALIVE! These students visit MAKESHOP about once a month. We try to give them design challenges to help them to be creative and…
Kai’s Invention
Kai is a regular visitor of the Museum. He is the kind of visitor who really enjoys tinkering with anything and everything. On this particular day, we were experimenting with making light-up cards using copper tape and LEDs. Kai was very interested in exploring what could be done with the copper tape and a piece of paper. He already had…
Glowing Bots!
Every month we have a theme that helps us to decide on new activities for MAKESHOP. We spent the month of December making projects and exploring materials that GLOW. We had glow-in-the-dark fabric, UV LEDs, lots of holiday lights, light painting, and some glow-in-the-dark paint. I had the brilliant idea to combine some of the GLOW activities with a ShopBot…
Aircraft Carrier
Joseph was a really fun kid to meet. He was one of those visitors who seemed to fit right in at MAKESHOP. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to create, but he came to a decision after he spent some time tinkering and exploring the materials. He first tinkered around with lighting up small LEDs with batteries. He eventually…
Re-purposing Old Parts
I decided to drastically change the xylophone that I built for MAKESHOP. While prototyping some ideas with a group of preschool students, some teachers and I noticed that they really enjoy filling up containers and dumping them out. They also really like to put things through holes and fit different size pieces together. I was unofficially commissioned to create a simple prototype…
Marble Maze
What can you make with an over sized hole punch? A couple of days ago a visitor created a really cool marble maze puzzle type thing. He spent a long time just tinkering with all of the different pieces of recycled materials in MAKESHOP. He eventually settled on using several tubes and a cardboard box that already had some holes punched out…