Children at this age rarely have much experience working with tools or resistant materials. By simplifying the design process for complex mechanical components and automating their fabrication, MachineShop allows users to create more complex and precisely crafted mechanisms than they could normally. By allowing them to work at the level of their creativity rather than their skills with tools and materials, I'm looking at how the creation of automata affects their mechanical reasoning and spatial cognition.

Provided below are links to documents and web pages related to my MachineShop research. My intentions are to make the next version of the MachineShop software available as an open source project, but there is currently no estimated date for that to happen. When it is ready, information will be available here.

A brief introduction to the research that will provide an overview of this work. This was created to introduce prospective users and their parents to what they would be doing.

A page of drawings, photos, and videos of some of the automata and mechanisms that have been built using MachineShop.

Links to pdf files of my dissertation can be found here.

I would like to thank everyone who has expressed an interest in the MachineShop program. Unfortunately, due to a number of issues, further development of the software has been halted and no version is currently available. This will remain so for the foreseeable future. I apologize to all of you who would like to utilize MachineShop in your teaching or research.