- [Narrator] iQ: smartparent is made possible in part by the McCune Foundation and the Grable Foundation.

- On today's iQ: smartparent it's an extreme home makeover, inspired by the Maker Movement.

From the family room to the kitchen and even the backyard, we'll reveal exciting projects to transform your home into a makerspace, and we'll show you how to do it on a family friend budget too.

It's a maker home makeover, coming up on iQ: smartparent and it starts right now.

(upbeat music) Welcome to iQ: smartparent.

I'm your host Darieth Chisolm.

They say the kitchen is the heart of the home.

So that's where we decided to kick things off for our home makeover, inspired by the Maker Movement.

Our first guest is Brad Peroney of the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Brad, thanks so much for being here in our kitchen.

- Thanks for having me today.

- Now, we could certainly find this as being one of the perfect places to turn it into a makerspace and you brought along a lot of things that we can make today.

So why don't we get started with a few of the things you brought.

- Sure, the first thing we have is an activity called potato stamps.

To do that it's really quite simple.

You cut a potato in half, the bigger the potato, the better, and you can either draw a shape on the potato and cut it out to make a stamp, or the way I like to do it, is just with a cookie cutter.

And so you can punch that right into the potato and carefully cut around that shape, and then you can brush on some ink, maybe screen printing ink or block printing ink, you can find those in art supply stores, and you can stamp and make whatever pattern you like, on a t-shirt or a tote bag.

- Yeah, certainly and this is very nice.

I mean, kids can get very creative, obviously, but this is turning something from art into, you know, something that could be sold, and so it essentially, helps them to understand - Absolutely.

- that they're making things that they might in fact, take to the marketplace, and what else do we have here?

- So, here we have some shrinking charms that we can make, out of recycled plastic.

So, if you look around in your recycling bin, you might find some clear plastic takeout containers, like this one, and if has the number six in the recycling symbol, that's what we're looking for today.

And so, what you do is you cut out a flat part of that plastic and you can decorate it with permanent markers, and you can punch a hole in it, if you'd like to put that on a key chain or a necklace, or something to that effect.

- I'm going to just start coloring.

- Yeah, color, make it however you like.

- You had few minutes to decorate there, so I'm going to, - Right, I did some already.

- do a little bit of something here.

- So, I made some things that I really enjoy.

I made a guitar, a slice of pizza, a B for my name.

So, what you do is you decorate it, color it, however you like, and then you simply just cut out those shapes and we pop them in a hot oven, and we'll watch as before our eyes these shapes will shrink, and they will get to be about 1/3 of the size they are now.

- And again, this is just, this, takeout, I mean, a container, as long as it has the number six, and then a couple of Magic Markers.

- Absolutely.

- And it goes right in the oven, as we'll see, and this is a great way to, as we say, make charms or jewelry, or what have you.

- Absolutely, you can make key chains, you can, if you're not very, you know, comfortable drawing, you can actually trace right through the plastic because it's transparent and so you can do your own shrinking selfie if you wanted to.

- Yeah, and I see you were able to make us our own iQ: smartparent key chain.

- Well, I couldn't come without making something especially just for you.

- I love this.

- And I just traced that out off of my phone.

So I pulled up the image and put the plastic right there and traced it on my phone screen.

- Yeah, and you could make just about anything you want, clearly, as long as you got the plastic and the pens, and you can get as creative as you'd like.

- Absolutely.

So, we'll just place these on our baking sheet, here.

We line it with foil, just so, that you don't accidentally leave it in too long and ruin a nice baking sheet, and then we pop it in the oven for a few minutes and when we pull it out, they'll be, very, very, very small, but they're going to look really great.

- Great, well let's go ahead and do that.

Let's get those in the oven cause I can't wait to see what they look like after we've given them a moment to cook for us.

But first, learn more about the start of the Maker Movement, and then meet a teen who took family game night, to a whole new level.

- [Jane] Try this, this switch, cause that's very cool.

- [Child] I connected this.

- It's looking at how technology and the do-it-yourself movement, kind of, have bumped up against each other, and how kids and families make things together.

I think there had been such an emphasis on technology and STEM, that now we're saying, well you what, there's more.

(energetic music) If you can make something, I think you can feel that you can understand the world.

- Building things with our hands, tinkering, playing, using different types of tools, it's the way that we build our identity.

- So, you have to make this circuit?

Pittsburgh is a hotbed of making culture.

From having our first full scale Maker Fair.

- [Man Blowing Bubbles] How are you doing with that?

- [Narrator] Kicking off Pittsburgh's first ever full scale Maker Fair, was the guru of making, a Californian named Dale Dougherty.

- Have you got the light to light up?

- [Narrator] Dale came up with the idea of Maker Fairs, and introducing making to the public, through his magazine.

- About 11, 12 years ago I came up with the idea for a magazine and I named it Make: and I really want it to be, kind of, a DIY projects magazine, that included technology, and kind of, fun, cool projects that you might do.

Kind of was a reinvention of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, from maybe the early 20th century.

And the spirit of of it, was like, you can do all these things, isn't it fun?

- [Narrator] The Magazine was a success from the start.

Dale was fascinated by the makers he was meeting and he wanted to share that.

- The intent was to make people more capable of doing things that really come out of their own mind, and that led me to thinking about an event to bring makers together.

And with my team, we kind of thought, well let's reinvent the county fair.

You know, instead of pigs and pies, we're going to have rockets and robots.

- [Abbey] I created a game called Letter Together, and the object of the game is to see who can spell their word the fastest.

- [Narrator] Abbey Valentine really puts her heart into her creations, especially the one she's demonstrating today at Maker Fair.

- To start off, every player gets five letter cards and then they get to pick one word card, and to play the game you have to try to spell your word with the letter cards.

Whoever spells their word first, will say Letter Together and ring the bell.

My game helps younger children learn how to spell words, while having a good time playing the game.

I want to show off my game at Maker Fair a little bit and maybe tell people more about my game.

And get suggestions from other makers.

I started it at the end of last school year, like the beginning of summer, and I've been working on it all summer.

I had a rough prototype.

The cards weren't the best condition and then when I took graphic arts, this year, I decided to make it, a little bit more permanent and nicer.

So, I've been working in that class to make it, to where it is today.

- [Narrator] Abbey found her passion in graphic design and her inspiration from her own family.

- I have a lot of younger cousins at home and I always made crafts for them to do at celebrations, and they really like doing that.

So I tried to incorporate my passion for designing stuff and make a game that we could all play together and have fun.

Olivia's turn to roll.

- Olivia's turn, we roll.

- [Abbey] Pick one from right here.

- [Narrator] Abbey might have started at home, but now her creations are out there for many to enjoy.

- This year for school, I joined Yearbook Club, and they asked me if I could design a shirt for Yearbook Club to wear at the homecoming parade.

My parents are really supportive of my making.

They don't know much about art or design, so they're a little, shaky on like, if it's going to work or not, but they think it's turning out really well and that it's a good experience.

- [Man] If she beats us, I'm quitting.

- [Abbey] She might.

(bell ringing) - Livy won, dream.

(laughs) - [Narrator] For most makers it's just the sheer joy of making itself.

- I don't know, it can teach you so much if you let it, and it just, it's fun.

- Making makes me feel great.

I don't really think about it much, when I'm working on it a lot.

It's just something that I do.

It's almost like, it's not work, but it's fun.

(upbeat music) - Brad Peroney from the Carnegie Science Center, is still with us.

So let's see what our plastic shapes are looking like now, Brad.

- Oh, they're looking really nice.

- [Darieth] Now how long were they in the oven?

- They were in the oven for just about three minutes.

- They look great.

- Yeah, you just have to watch and you know, peek through the oven a few times to make sure that everything is going according to plan, and if they're a little curled, you can just flatten them down with an oven mitt and make them nice and flat.

- Now we're going to have all the times for baking and all of that on our website.

So you can get all the details about that, but they turned out really nice.

- Yeah, and the colors get really concentrated and vivid, so they look even better when they're done.

- Right and of course, you punched a few holes in some of these, so now they are key chains, or bag clips, or jewelry.

So they're very useful.

- Yeah, they're very useful, and perfectly customizable, so you can express yourself and your interests.

- Great, so we've got another project, what is this?

- So this is something that we can call Squishy Circuits, or electric Play-Doh.

If you've ever made your own Play-Doh at home, we can show you how to make some that conducts electricity, and we can make electrical circuits, using this material.

- Alright, well I'd love to get to that, but you also brought the ingredients to actually make the Play-Doh.

- Absolutely.

- So what does that entail?

- So we have a cup of flour in our pot.

We're going to add in a quarter cup of salt, that's going to help the electricity to flow.

We're going to add a carefully measured tablespoon of vegetable oil.

- I like the carefully measured.

(chuckles) - Three tablespoons of cream of tartar.

- Okay.

- And a cup of water, tap water's just fine for that.

And then we'd stir that up, cook it on medium heat until it forms a nice hard dough ball.

Then we let it cool and knead it in flour until you get to the perfect consistancy.

- Right, so of course if that's really cooked there, this is what we get.

Our Play-Doh.

- This is the end result.

I added some food coloring to this one to make it look really fun, and if we hook that up to a battery pack, we can get electricity flowing through here, enough that we can make some lights light up.

- So let's look at that now because that's great, not only did we make this, but now we're making something with electricity, which is-- - [Brad] Right, so we're going to make an electrical circuit.

- [Darieth] Okay.

- So we have red wire and a black wire.

That's the positive and negative ends of the battery, and each of our LED lights has a long wire and a short wire.

If we connect the long wire on the light to the red wire on the battery pack, we can get the electricity flowing.

If we flip it around, - Now that has to be fascinating - nothing will happen.

- for a kid to look at, because this is, I mean obviously we're taking things we have at home and we're making this and we've turned this into a science project.

- Absolutely, so we're doing science in the kitchen.

You can make art with this.

You can make sculptures with eyes that light up, if you have some old broken toys, maybe you can scavenge some motors or some other parts out of there to make your own creations, whatever you can imagine.

- So should parents be concerned about safety?

I mean, clearly this hasn't been too messy, they want to be on hand, but it doesn't appear to be unsafe, at all.

- So, everything here is perfectly edible.

It's going to taste really salty and not very good, but it's perfectly safe to play with, if you store it in an airtight container.

You can save it for a few weeks.

- I was going to ask, will this stay mushy, because Play-Doh, when I was growing up, if it was left out in the air, that's it.

It didn't last for too long.

- Yeah.

Put it in a tightly sealed bag or container and it should stay fresh for you, until you get this turning into a biology experiment.

- Yeah, real quick, Brad.

The advice that you give to parents, especially when it comes to getting creative, what would that be?

- Let your imaginations run wild and don't be afraid to make a mess, and above all, failure is going to happen, so just embrace it and learn from it, and pick yourself up and try it again.

- Yeah, it's a lot of fun, especially when you can get creative with things, and kids learn a lot with this as well.

- Absolutely, I've seen kids as young as three making circuits with these, Play-Doh.

- Well, thank you for teaching me to make these things.

So I do appreciate you being here and now from the kitchen to the great outdoors, learn how to turn backyard playtime into a memorable maker moment.

(upbeat music) (playful music) - [Narrator] Like most children, five-year-old Ben, three-year-old Clara, and one-year-old Alex, are just full of energy and love to play.

- They love to do imaginative play and just makeup games between themselves, and where they each take on roles or build with things.

- [Narrator] Their mother, Marissa Lipinski, enjoys seeing her kids tap into their creativity.

- [Marissa] Can anybody tell what this one is?

- [Narrator] So she often comes up with maker opportunities to enrich their play.

- I like to set up things for them, like outside I'll put buckets of water and sand, and then send them outside.

Like yesterday, for example, they made little balls of sand and mud, and then dried them on the table, and then they asked me if I wanted to come buy some, and made their own little mud ball store.

I set it up with them, they take the lead and take it wherever they want to go with it.

- [Narrator] Marissa believes that by giving her children the freedom to make and create, she's investing in their future.

- It'll serve them for the rest of their life.

You know, when they're young, maybe they're making those balls out of sand and clay, but then later, maybe they're coming up with new and innovative ideas.

So we have a bin that we keep in our house, in one of the rooms, and we throw all sorts of household materials in there.

Things that we typically throw in the recycling bin, like empty yogurt containers or toilet paper roll holders, or we'll throw maps or things from our trip in there, and the kids just use it and come up with purposes for these objects that we never would have considered.

I just think the more that you can expose your kids to new places and new things to do, the better, and we're always trying to seek fun activities that can really engage them and their minds.

(playful music) - [Narrator] Which is why Marissa brought her family to Simmons Farm, just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Here, Ben and Clara will learn how to make a raised bed garden, during a special maker event.

- Right now, we're going to demonstrate how anybody can build a raised bed garden.

- [Narrator] Dennis Smiddle is the sponsor of this event.

He's a retired childcare and playground safety inspector, who now advocates for more fitness, arts, nature and science in outdoor play settings.

He calls his three-year-old movement, Fans Of Play.

- Children need to be active and involved in more beneficial and healthier play and learning.

The Traditional playground is more or less, structured play, where you can only do what it's designed for, swinging, climbing, or sliding.

So it doesn't really have the cognitive social and emotional benefits that children need, and it doesn't really connect them with nature, and healthy foods, how to grow healthy foods.

- [Narrator] That's part of Dennis's mission today.

To show that building a garden can be easy and fun.

First though, he needs to build the boarder.

Ben and Clara are eager to help.

- [Dennis] Simply, interlock the plastic boarders, install the pins, okay.

I think we just built the most attractive raised-bed garden, Ta-da.

- Yay.

- Good job.

- [Narrator] With the framework of the garden completed, the kids now turn their attention to the planting itself.

- Hello.

- Hi, what you got there?

- [Narrator] Ashley Mariani works for a company that makes a type of potting soil produced from paper and fiber, which the kids are using in the raised garden.

- [Ashley] And we're going to plant some tomatoes.

- [Narrator] The kids are using it in the raised garden.

- I think Marker Movement is all about self-sufficiency and Independence, and being able to create things with your own two hands and the tools around you.

Gardening plays right into that.

This making things, growing things, and really owning that production of your crops and flowers.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] But while gardening is generally not considered a risky activity, safety must always be a concern for anyone involved in a maker project.

- Supervision is always the number one priority for safety.

Children must be supervised properly and that means being able to see them, hear them, and assess the activity that they're involved in.

Any risk for children needs to be managed risks.

- [Marissa] Look at the basil, you want to taste it?

- [Narrator] Whether Ben and Clara are building a garden, - Do you want to pull up some of our beets?

- [Narrator] or marketing mud balls to customers, - [Marissa] There you go, Clara.

- [Narrator] Marissa always keeps a watchful eye on them, but she's careful not to stifle them, because she believes maker projects open up a whole new world.

- The value of making is that it lets kids be kids, and come up with things on their own, that don't necessarily have a pre-determined end result.

Kids don't need to be told how to have fun, they'll seek it out on their own, as long as you provide the opportunities for them.

- And welcome to our final guest today, Kipp Bradford.

Kipp is a research scientist at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he's also a founding board member for Nation of Makers.

Welcome to the show, appreciate you being here.

- Thank you very much, it's wonderful to be here.

I love makerspaces and I know when I was growing up, we didn't necessarily call them makerspaces, but would you say you grew up in a home where you had a makerspace?

- I definitely grew up in a home where, the things that I did were highly encouraged and I made a lot of stuff.

My parents were people who really supported me fabricating things, building things.

My grandparents also did a lot of making.

My grandfather build the house that my mom grew up in and had a shed outback that had a ton of tools that I was always getting in trouble with.

So, it was an activity.

- You got to explore, yeah in lots of different activities, and speaking of exploring, you brought a few things for us to play with today.

- I did.

- So, if you'll tell us a little bit about that and even the irony of how this came to be today.

- Well, I didn't bring the box that I wanted, and it turns out that I've got friends who work at a local makerspace, so we got together and gathered up a bunch of materials that you can normally find around the house, and you can make a lot of fun stuff with.

- [Darieth] And that just goes to show that, you know, you really can just find, just about anything around the house and make it make-do, in a makerspace.

- Absolutely.

So one of the things that I like to do is to start off with, basic electronics.

LEDs are a really, really, fun and simple way to explore the flow of electricity.

So, here I have a coin cell, it's just a three volt coin cell, you can get at a store for a couple bucks, and an LED, you can find these online, just about anywhere, and they're very, very inexpensive, less than a dollar.

- [Darieth] And what would you use it with?

- So sometimes, if you want to expand the experience, I'll take aluminum foil and we'll just make a circuit, a very simple circuit, that I can wrap one part of the aluminum foil around one leg of the LED, and do the same thing with the other leg.

So, I just made wires using aluminum foil.

- Yeah, this reminds me of the Lite-Brite toy.

- Yeah, yeah, Lite-Brite was, only had a single light element.

I'll flip this around the other way, and here what we can get kids doing is, there a second, get this to light up through the aluminum foil, and now I can start to take the aluminum foil and make things on the paper.

So, I might tape this down, and glue this down.

I can tape my battery down to here, as well, and as I fabricate different shapes, we can do things, like I can make a paper airplane, for example, and I can make the paper airplane light up, using the aluminum foil as wires, on the circuit.

- So it is, it's about learning about circuitry and having kids really understand just the simple components to making that happen.

What else did you bring?

- I actually brought a paper airplane.

So, people take this for granted.

They look and say, oh gosh, it's just an airplane, but when you think about this, I'm transforming a basic sheet of paper into something that helps kids understand flight.

And yes, I can toss this around, depending on the shape that you make it, it'll fly different ways.

Some fly fast, some fly far.

- You know it's interesting though, because we made paper planes when we were younger and the idea of doing it and having fun, but there's so many other things that kids, sometimes, can capture their attention and something as simple as that, may not.

So how do you encourage, or how would you say parents should encourage their kids to just play with some of the basics.

- Put the materials in front of them and give them lots of materials to play with.

I think there's also a very easy ability to step up some of the things that kids are making.

So integrating very simple electronics with things that programmable computers that you might buy online.

There are a number of very, very, inexpensive computing platforms, that could take an LED, like I showed you, make it blink different patterns.

You could have multiple LEDs that can create light shows, so start to incorporate some of the more advanced electronics into some of the projects is pretty easy to do and again, fairly inexpensive and simple.

- And you don't need, like, laser printers and more fancy equipment to do this.

These are basic things that you can find in your home and get really creative in doing it.

- This is, probably $15 worth of materials, and for another $20 you can add a simple computer, and make your projects really shine, and make motors run, so it's easy to expand on.

- And they're pretty basic, and yet these are some of the same things that you work with, with some of your students at MIT.

- Absolutely.

So, I was actually faculty at Brown University, before MIT and I taught the senior engineer and design classes, and when you have students who are trying to build things, I always start them out with cardboard, with tongue depressors, with very, very basic materials because they can explore ideas quickly and not spend a lot of money, and not be intimidated by the processes.

- So, any final advice you would have for parents to help them step up basic arts and crafts, so that it really does help children explore and expand more?

- I think one of the most important things is model behaviors that you want.

So, if you want your kids to explore some of these materials and explore making, do it yourself.

These materials are very common, they're very accessible, they're very easy to use, and they're very fun, so kids and parents working together to play with some of these things and you know, make paper airplanes together, that's the sort of thing that gets kids excited, that hey, this is something that I want to do.

- Yeah, I call it taking it back to the basics.

So Kipp, thanks so much for being here for today's show.

And we hope today's maker home makeover has inspired you to do a little redecorating in your own home, so your kids can develop the 21st century skills that will set them up for success.

Thanks for being here and join us again next time for more iQ: smartparent.

- [Narrator] Want to learn more about iQ: smartparent, visit us online at iQsmartparent.org.

For more episodes and additional tools go to Resources.

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(upbeat music) iQ: smartparent is made possible in part by the McCune Foundation and the Grable Foundation.