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Good Robot Projects For K-5?
bugs2squash writes "Some of the parents of kids at my son's elementary school would like to set up a robotics club for the children. I see that Lego has a new line of robotics bricks called wedo (PDF) and that seems to be the path of least resistance to doing something. But I wanted to ask: What experience do all y'all have of running a robotics club for this age group (5 thru 10 years old) and what factors made it a success (or failure)? Did you use a commercial kit of parts or brew something from scratch? What kind of projects work well with kids this age? I was thinking maybe making robot flowers (yes, I know they'd all rather build robotic sharks with lasers)." (Here's another page about Wedo.)
... when you were a kid you had a lot of friends.
My favourite toys when I was age 5-10 were capsela, construx, and Jr. Radio kits. I only wish shows like Battlebots were around to further pique my interest.
Anything you can do to get your kid into higher-level thinking and problem solving (like elementary computer programming and robotics) will give them a huge leg-up in the education system. Any way you can make it fun for them will help them understand more.
I can't find the story now. But there's a story about the old Canadian wilderness. A guy took his 12 year old son over the mountains to setup a new homestead. They built a temporary house and before the winter the father left the son and returned back to the rest of the family.
The son was there in the spring when the dad brought the rest of the family. Granted 5th grade is only 10-11, but a 12 year old than managed to hunt, clean, and survive in the Canadian wilderness a hundred years ago.
Stop treating kids like precious little snow flakes. Yes they need some guidance but they're a hell of a lot more capable than people give them credit for. I was building Capsela since I could walk and my parents swear that's why I became an engineer. A very basic programming language would have rocked.
When I was in 5th grade our school had a Commodore 64 and an Mac LCII. I would flip through the manual and set different color schemes on the Commodore (First time I was accused of "Hacking" by a teacher too....) and I figured out quite a bit on the LCII. (Including the plain text file that it stored MathBlaster scores in ;) ).
Don't forget that Lego and your kid's creativity aren't the only winners here. According to the last, parenthetical link in the summary it's powered by LabView, which is something every technical person will see again and again in their lifetime.
Its modular, graphical interface is a perfect compliment for Lego-style robot building(and is also invaluable for test and measurement automation).
This is a really simple project, which can be found on Instructables, but one can also buy kits...
www.blinkybug.com
While it's a stretch to call them robots, they do interact in a way, and can help kids understand the basics of electricity and sensors. they antennae form a really simple spring switch, which triggers the blinking of their eyes (LEDs), and the body is a coin cell battery. I made some of these at a workshop at the Maker Faire a while ago.
Combine them. Have the kids build turtle kits and program them to draw. They're easy to build (two drive motors and one pen motor), easy to program (left speed, right speed, pen up or down), and produce immediate results that the kids can see.
In all seriousness, this was one of my first exposures to robotics and programming. It's still a fantastic start.
Makezine ran an article last week on an interesting robot that looks appropriate for that age group.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
I feel obliged to mention my colleague's PhD thesis project from CMU, which he's now (I think) in the process of commercializing. It's called roblocks at the moment, and it's a modular robotic construction kit. Each block is an autonomous robot with onboard computation. Some blocks have sensors, others are actuators, and others can perform math. You can build different behaviors by connecting them together.
Roblocks are incredibly cool. Some may go so far as to say they are rad.