Whether your child wants to create something they can take home with them that day or work on a longer term project, Open Shop is the place to do it. Our expert Guides (architects, engineers, designers, and developers) will work with them as they flex their creative muscles and turn ideas into reality.

Let Them Lead the Way

At BitSpace, we start with YES! Your child wants to design the "perfect" house? Absolutely -- let’s design at multiple scales and explore a whole community while we're at it. How about a garden that grows itself? Go ahead...but what if we try to get our plants to talk to us as well?

Wherever their imagination takes them we have the high and low tech tools to help them build those skills and become tomorrow’s inventors and producers – not just consumers – of designed objects, technology, and media. If it sounds fun, it’s because it is. The fact that it will help prepare them for a world where companies seek creativity over all other soft skills? Well, we can always keep that between us…!

Creating Opportunities

We don’t just know the Maker world, we are leading it. After years of offering programs at two youth-focused makerspaces in Chicago and at over 100 schools, we know what works. We guide our youth learners through a combination of customized Design Thinking and Maker Mindset projects to achieve things they never thought would be possible, all while letting them lead the way.

• We give kids unprecedented access to an array of state-of-the-art tools not even found in most colleges

• We encourage BitSpacers to learn how to use all these tools themselves (in a supervised environment)

• We encourage kids to let their imagination run wild and find ways to create the things they dream up

• High and low tech skills are embraced here

• Collaboration drives everything we do

• We focus on fun. Kids learn best when it’s fun. And believe us -- this is fun!