Robots are an ingrained part of fictional media and can appear fascinating to your kids when they see them in videos or movies. Because of this, they may want to create robots of their own at home. While making androids with human-level intelligence or giant mechanical superheroes isn’t within your grasp, you can build simple robots with the right instructions, parts, and tools. Spend quality family time together with these beginner robot projects to do with kids. You’ll have fun and expose your children to skills and ideas that they may utilize to a greater extent in the future.
Propeller Car
Though it is not technically a robot, a propeller car is a good introduction to the world of robotics because it shows you how to wire together a simple machine. You can gather a piece of cardboard, wood skewers, and bottle caps to form the body of the car. On top of this assembly, you will connect a couple of AA batteries with a small motor with an attached propeller. There are battery holders complete with wires that allow you to do this easily by making a complete circuit with the motor. You can explain the concepts behind circuits to your kids as you go through the steps together.
Obstacle-Avoiding Robot
An obstacle-avoiding robot will also probably function with a main body on wheels like the propeller car. However, it involves more intricacies, as you must include a sensor for it to detect objects in its way and a computer board to program changes in movements. You can find ultrasonic sensors that are small enough to fit on the robot. These send out ultrasonic beams and then receive them back to find out how far away obstacles in front of them are. When something is in the way, the programs you input in the small computer will tell two wheel motors which direction to rotate so that the robot can turn. A good computer to use for this project is an Arduino Nano. You can find in-depth tutorials for these obstacle-avoiding robots online.
Programmable Robot
This project is similar to the obstacle-avoiding robot, except that you have the freedom to preset the robot’s movements in various ways. You may use two separate motors for a left and right wheel, which you control with a computer board. The robot itself can have a box or board for a body. Besides the Arduino models previously mentioned, you can also use a Raspberry Pi as the robot’s brains. This is a similar computer board that is small and perfect for putting on homemade robots and other mechanical devices. Look up articles on how to build a Raspberry Pi robot to figure out the specifics of the coding that go into making the programmable robot move in different ways. Since computers are so pervasive in many fields, this can help your kids start to understand skills that will be practical for them in a professional setting one day.
