Find free fun in the techPLAYground Pop-up at SouthSide Works

This article first appeared in NEXTpittsburgh, a media partner that focuses on the people advancing the Pittsburgh region.

 Swingsets, slides, jungle gyms — when it comes to playgrounds, you’re going to have to try a little harder to get the attention of today’s digital-native kids.

OK, all kids still love a good slide. But there are innovations happening in playground spaces. The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh’s MuseumLab will be showing some of them off at SouthSide Works starting Aug. 4.

The techPLAYground Pop-up, operating indoors at 2738 Sidney St., was designed with the help of students from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.

“We are always excited to take play experiences beyond the walls of the museum,“ says Anne Fullenkamp, senior director of creative experiences at the Children’s Museum. “TechPLAYground represents the first interactive exhibit pop-up to come out of MuseumLab.”

The playground includes a high-tech take on Musical Chairs, which can be played like instruments by sitting on them. Musicians will be able to quickly figure out how to play a song — others will have fun trying. There’s also the Holding Hands feature, where a message from Mister Rogers displays when two or more people complete an electrical circuit by holding hands.

Artists Owen Lowery and Jordan Graves contributed unique, interactive play elements to the project.

Graves’s “Community Garden” asks visitors to digitally draw flowers on their own smart devices and display them in a communal field, filled with others’ blooms. The Community Garden can be accessed from anywhere in the world, so the possibilities are endless.

In Lowery’s “The Cryptid Simulator,” participants step in front of a camera and appear on a screen as paper cutouts of a cryptid, mythical creatures like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster or the Mothman. The scene depicts where the cryptid’s legend first spawned and fun facts about them.

Lowery’s Change the Code feature is a simple intro to computer coding that alters chunks of code to change scenes, colors and patterns.

The playground is free and open to the public from 2 to 8 p.m. daily through the end of October.

“Uniquely positioned just across the river from our department, the pop-up location at SouthSide Works will allow for new capacity for playtesting, development and deployment of more free-to-play interactive experiences,” says John Balash, director of educational engagement for CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center.

Adults can be forgiven if they want to get in on the fun, too.