Recently we attended a STEM event in our city. It was a family friendly event rich with Science, Engineering concepts. We got to meet a few enthusiastic basketball playing robots, R2D2 , attended a great Q&A session with NASA astronaut Megan McArthur. The twins had quite a few hands on activities like building circuits with snapcircuits kit, building brushbots, making flashlights, building and launching their own rocket etc.
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| Meeting R2D2 |
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| Nidhi building a Bristlebot |
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| "Look a flashlight with popsicle stick!" |
Their excitement lingered on for quite sometime after returning home. They played with their brushbots for long time. It is a very simple build with a toothbrush head, a small battery and motor.
We then wondered if they can use these brushbots to paint. They dipped the brush in some watered down acrylic paint and the little robots colored the paper beautifully.
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| Painting with little BristleBots |
We then explored how we can build a bigger robot that make art. The solution is simple. We just need a bit bigger power source and motor. We had a snap circuits jr kit at home. May be we can use the components from that kit. This kit is much easier for little hands to build circuits.We also chose markers in place of brush.
The result was great. We enjoyed this project. I know there are lots of similar drawbot/artbot instructions scattered around the internet. However, it is more exciting to work with what we have at hand in the house. There was lot of learning and problem solving involved.
Sid and Nidhi have learnt a lot of technical vocabulary such as power source, motor, wire, open circuit, closed circuit, IC, series and parallel circuits.
Here is a video of our artbot making experience.
Today they noticed our malfunctioning doorbell and Sid said, "Mom, why don't we build our own doorbell circuit?". Sure!
