Meep! Meep! Boop! Boop! Bristle Bots coming through!
Last week kids at the ReCreate Circuits and Robotics camp had a blast racing their bristle bots around homemade battle arenas, and making their wiggly insects dance through their handmade tracks.
Showing off the wiggly insects.
The week started with a lesson on basic circuits as kids made LED art with copper tape. They learned that a circuit is like a racetrack, and the electricity travels in one direction just like racecars (except when they crash!) Then with squishy circuits the campers made some sculptures with conductive and insulative playdough. So cute!
Tuesday brought on the ultimate challenge: building a bristle bot from a toothbrush head, vibrating motor, and coin cell battery. The campers became circuit experts, using wire to make a loop between their components to get their bristle bot hopping across the table. As an extra challenge, the robot makers practiced their creativity and making skills constructing their ultimate battle arena. The bristle bots spent lots of time in the bot hospital after that!
Each day new pages were added to the journals, documenting the lessons on circuits and robotics and designing their ultimate dream robot. By Wednesday, they had the skills to build a wiggly insect robot with a switch! The wiggly insects were very fun, especially racing around their homemade race tracks.
On Thursday, each robot master spent some time at seven different learning stations, rotating through a circuit design challenge with Ryan, playing with Snap Circuits, writing their own code and programming a maze, playing a programming board game (Robot Turtles), experimenting with a Makey Makey to play music through fruit, learning about robots on the Lightbot App, and watching a cool video on robots.
Programming a route to navigate a maze.
On the final day of Circuits and Robotics camp, our budding robot extraordinaires got to spend time deconstructing old electronics to find more art parts for their ultimate robot. Some campers made thank you cards with conductive copper tape and LED’s, and others got an awesome soldering lesson from our resident soldering guru, Ryan. Friday concluded with a giant construction session to finish the robots in time to take them home.
Free making time!
Over the course of a week, our campers went from circuit n00bs to robot masters, and have some great new electronics skills to take to their next making adventure!!!