Leonardo’s Basement

Ahhh this place makes me want to have kids JUST to be able to send them here!
Leonardo’s Basement is a crazy amazing workspace with after school programs and summer classes for kids (mostly, some for adults too). It’s pretty much a hands on learning space where children get to explore the extents of their creativity! Walking in you feel like you’ve stumbled into your crazy inventor uncle’s basement: filled to the brim with contraptions the students and staff have built, the tools for building, and all the junk you’d need to build more contraptions.
They have classes for every kind of interest, from building functioning robots to learning how to fix a bike, to making costumes, to cooking. They take things that children only dream of (like building a giant maze out of 30+ cardboard refrigerator boxes) and turn them into realities. They have such a variety of classes that you just have to check out the schedule to figure out the specifics.
If I had to summarize it in one sentence it would be: This is a place that focuses on the joys of creating through building, experimenting, and learning how to take ideas out of your brain, put them on paper, and then make them physical objects.
For the grown-​ups they also offer some classes on making things, through the affiliated Studio Bricolage (linked on their website).
We were told to check this place out by many members of the design/​tinker community here and after seeing it for myself this afternoon I’m really happy to know a place like this exists.