Community Networks Wanaka always put on a fantastic school holiday programme. It’s been a while since I’ve run a session for them, so as you can imagine I was rather excited to get back there again.
The brief was pretty simple. Let’s make robots. It was my task to create something as inspiring as possible and have a think at what would be possible for this primary school age group of young people to be engaged with on a sunny Friday during summer holidays.
I put together a slide show to set the scene. This was a technology challenge, I wanted people thinking. What are robots? What do they do? I seemed to pitch it just right. There was heaps of excited conversation. Lots of knowledge about robots and lots of chatter about what was possible.
We needed to first decide what our robots are to do, a simple brainstorm would suffice. Then, once we knew what we wanted it to do the real challenge began. I had managed to find a pile of flattened cardboard moving boxes. Quite simply they were perfect.
Everyone had pretty much the same materials to work with. The ideas were flowing and the excitement building. Having a good turn out of adult help made it completely and utterly possible. One of the main thins I noticed was that some of the manufacturing was a little tricky for the young people we had in attendance, however with some help the ideas soon started to become reality.
I couldn’t believe how they progressed. We had a lovely selection of individual robots and team robots. Everyone putting their own twist to the challenge. I’m sure you’ll all agree this is a fantastic way to spend a day using recovered resources to make entertainment and get young minds thinking.
