The Children’s Museum provides innovative museum experiences that inspire joy, creativity, and curiosity. They achieve this through exhibits that are based on the philosophy of Play with Real Stuff, where real things and real processes challenge children’s abilities and help them understand the world we live in, and themselves, better. Children can take off on fantastic flights of imagination and return to earth to build a boat, play in the mud, hammer a nail and change the tire on a car. To accommodate our youngest visitors, each exhibit includes an area with activities designed to meet the developmental needs of infants and toddlers.

MakeShop was created through a unique partnership among Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE). It is a space within the Museum dedicated to nurturing and furthering informal learning opportunities and research-based understanding at the intersection of the digital and the physical. MakeShop pushes the envelope of informal learning through the integration of old and new technologies into DIY, project-based activities in a hands-on workshop environment.