TECH LAB @ OMSI

The Tech Lab is the maker space at OMSI. Here are the things we are trying and the sweet things our visitors are making.

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a bunch of kids are building cardboard arcades. their chaperone comes over.  chaperone: "hey girls, are you having fun here or would you like to go ride the elevator?"  girls: "elevator!"  they all leave.

this building is only two floors! how exciting can an elevator be?

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Our volunteer Ben took an arduino hack for sending morse code and adapted it to the telegraph exhibit that sends messages from the Tech Lab to the Physics Lab. Now instead of sending your message one dot and dash at a time you can type your message into the computer, and the ardunio parses the ascii into morse code and sends it across the hall to the Physics Lab. So neat!

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Totally great Saturday in the Tech Lab. Things were slow until Michael, a volunteer came by and wanted to watch/ show the live First Robotics Finals in St.Louis. It is pretty fascinating and adding a lot of energy to the Lab. 

Also, Ethan made what is probably my favorite Cardboard Arcade game to date, OMSI FUN, kinda like quarter football only OMSI vs the Other Museum, with a pretty sweet scoring system. 

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The Train Mutener, a great little stop motion animation, but all the train movies kinda blend together.

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One of my favorite things about facilitating in a museum is how much the question, "hey, what are you trying to do?" disrupts people who are doing something annoying to the point where you can redirect them to doing something productive.

In a lot of ways, that question is human equivalent of drawing a line in front of the chicken's beak.

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This car race game was made right at the end of the day. We love how she designed her own vehicles to add to the story of the game.

And check out the amazing problem solving in the close ups! How the finish line catches the back wheels to the cars don’t fall of the table! How the chassis is extended by taping two laminant samples together!

Such nice problem solving.

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Today in the Tech Lab we made lots of cardboard arcade games. Mostly maze games and basketball style games. And if you look closely, you'll see that a lot of them were Easter themed. 

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First day of the new makier Tech Lab. We played with circuits, made things out of recycled materials, made shapes out of tangrams and build a Lego neighborhood. And of course 3D printed things.