Lynxie's Art Studio is in its new home at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh!

This past Saturday, May 9, was our Grand Opening. With great fanfare of balloons, posters, and a slide show, the finished exhibit was set up on the floor of the Children's Museum and opened for public use. Thank you to everyone who came and helped make this day a success! It was especially great to have our interns there to help with the setup and to have them be able to demo their own project, the tic-tac-toe playing robots.

Here are some pictures from the day:

Grand Opening Overall

Grand Opening Front

Grand Opening Child Drawing

Grand Opening Child Watching

Yesterday we met with Greg and Heather at the Children's Museum to get their advice on materials and construction for the robotic painter exhibit. While we were there we brought along our interns' cardboard mock-up of the exhibit and asked a bunch of kids of different ages to see if they could touch the top of the child's programming station. We wanted to make sure that they'd be able to easily reach all parts of the exhibit interface.

With the help of a step, even a two-and-a-half-year old visitor was able to touch the top.

With the cabinet design tested and client-approved, we're moving full-speed into construction!

On Monday, we drove down to the Children's Museum to do some playtesting of painting materials and paper sizes. We were trying to see what was most commonly used and what the kids preferred when painting.

Our observations showed us that kids under 5 tended to not care about the structure of what they were drawing. Even younger seemed to be more concerned with the tactile feeling of the brush and paint and mixing the colors together. Younger kids were done very quickly and were satisfied with quick scribbles on paper. The older kids, around 7 yrs old, would spend longer on the paintings and be almost meticulous about the placement of their colors.

The Children's Museum had a good answer to the question of what paper size to use by having square-cut paper at 14in x 14in. This lets the kids decide to draw portrait or landscape. Keeping around the 14in marker seems to be a good idea considering the size of the kids.

I think the most interesting thing was when Betsy asked these 2 girls about robots. When she asked them whether they liked robots, they both said no. But when Betsy asked what if a robot could paint them a picture, they said they thought it would be so cool.

Logo for the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

We went to meet with Jane from the Children's Museum today to discuss our 3 robot concepts. We were totally worried that she'd just be happy with them all and leave the final decision up to us... which meant we'd probably be spending the rest of the semester still deciding on a concept :P

Our original three project concept proposals, as presented to the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

Lauren reminded me about this video clip of Mr. Rogers defending PBS to the US Senate:

Watching this may give you a sense of what Jane Werner is searching for when she says that young kids need someone to do for new media what Fred Rogers did for children's television.