Pittsburgh Science Workshop believes it is every child’s right to explore, tinker, and be creative. A community science workshop (CSW) is chock-full of fascinating things: rocks and bones, homemade hovercrafts, physics contraptions, spinning wobble-bots, and live snakes and lungfish. It is a place where neighborhood kids and families can drop in for free to explore their own interests and ideas, build projects, learn new skills, and get curious about new science topics. It is a place of community and inspiration. At a CSW, children can learn important science concepts from their own physical, hands-on experiences. They become authors of their own education.

CSWs focus on serving low-income and underrepresented communities, particularly communities that have been historically oppressed and marginalized. CSW’s facilitate and promote learning the science that matters to the members of that specific community.  In addition to offering out-of-school programs, CSW’s collaborate with schools and other youth-serving programs to augment their science education.

Since 1992, CSWs have grown and thrived in a range of cities, and Pittsburgh is now part of this vibrant movement. The program model has been thoroughly evaluated over a 12 year period and found to be replicable, cost-effective, and to have important short and long-term benefits for participants.