FF: How do you think about the bridge between playing and creative learning? If a child comes to the museum and they’re there to have fun, like you were at EPCOT, how do you keep that fun and playful element while intentionally make it a teaching or learning experience?

LB: Well, I think the best learning experiences are fun, especially when it comes to the arts. If you don’t feel like you’re playing, then you’re probably not learning very much, honestly. You’re probably doing something that is rote to you or familiar to you. Playing is about experimenting and challenging yourself or your community. And, honestly, some of the best play isn’t fun—sometimes it’s really hard. I was visiting the jewelry camp this morning, and they were all so quiet and focused. I went up to each child and asked them about what they were working on. They each went on and on about what they were creating, and each one was different than the other. And so, to me that means that there’s something playful going on. They’re not all making the same thing. They’re playing around with their own ideas. The director of the Children’s Museum used to say that you bump into learning at the Children’s Museum—you bump into it because you’re just having fun. So I think in an ideal situation, there’s no start and stop. There’s no bridge. It’s just baked in.

FF: What was the inspiration for you and the people you were working with to create the makerspace at the Children’s Museum?

LB: I was fortunate in meeting Jane Warner, who’s the executive director of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. We immediately connected—we’re both makers; we both like to sew. We hit it off really quickly and knew immediately that we both learned and identified this way as people in the world.

At the time, there was an exhibit at the Children’s Museum called The Studio, which was an art studio. It focused more on fine art processes, painting and screen printing and drawing. It was messy space in a wonderful way, you know, because it was a children’s museum and it was open ended.

At the time, we would do studies of dwell time in the children’s museum: how long did families stay in any given space? And people would stay in The Studio way longer than anywhere else. It makes sense, right? That you would get invested in something. And then we found that parents were more invested in their kids’ experience there, more involved. So we knew there was something really special going on there. And at the time, this was in 2009, the Maker Movement was just like gaining a little bit of momentum, especially in the educational sphere. As a point of reference, at the time for us at the Children’s Museum “making” meant hands-on, learner-driven creative experiences at the intersection of the digital and the physical. Often using traditional craft tools, materials, and processes, but exploring them in new ways. Maker education has become known as an approach to learning that positions agency at the center, asking learners to become more aware of the design of the world around them, and to begin to see themselves as people who can tinker, hack, and improve that design.

So, this was bubbling up, and Jane went to the Maker Faire in San Francisco and met the person at the head of Make magazine. She came back super inspired. And she was like, this is the next big thing, and she said to me, “Lisa, we need to figure out how to do something like this at the Children’s Museum. And you’re in charge.” And at the time I was a graduate student—but I was just like, “Okay, let’s do it.” And so we just dove in.

There were other museums that were engaged in these concepts, like STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math—so this stuff was happening, but no one had really thought about it as a family learning experience with young children in a designed environment the way were thinking about it. Jane gave us $5,000 and half of a staff person’s time and a corner of an exhibit for space, and we just prototyped it. We learned a lot really quickly from what we tested out that first summer. We first started with electronics. We made some circuit blocks, and we just put them out there and noticed how families engaged with them and how we were facilitating that experience. And then we moved on to sewing, and we put out sewing machines—and suddenly we were like, “Oh, wait a second. We have to figure out how to scaffold the use of sewing machines.” Like, what is a needle? What is thread? How do you get a two-year-old to engage in this process in a meaningful way? And then we did woodworking, and we quickly were like, “Oh my God, we have to do this safely!”

So we learned a ton through prototyping, and then we designed the permanent exhibit space to reflect what we had learned. Another important thing, I think, and this is actually really important when it comes to play, is that our hypothesis for our prototype was that for every child that came into the makerspace, we would ask them, “What do you want to make today?” and we would help them make that thing. And they’d walk away with a thing. We learned so quickly that we had it all wrong, that it was all about the process and had very little to do with the product. It was more about helping children and families learn that, for instance, your clothes were made by sewing two pieces of fabric together, more than it was about having the article of clothing at the end. That process was so much more gratifying, as well as the use of tools and materials—real tools and materials. The real deal. So we were thinking about how to scaffold that and allow everybody—all ages and abilities—access to those tools and processes.