Solar System Celebration

It felt like the end of this school year deserved a good celebration! But I also didn't want to do anything that took too much preparation…prep time being rather a scarce resource around here. So we didn't do anything very fancy. Still, we had a fun time!

One activity we did was building Robot Arms like the one on the International Space Station. (Shown in this video, for example.) The children did this in teams, and there were moments of frustration…but they worked through them.

The parameters we used for this activity are found here (these Design Squad activities are always fun). The goal was to build a robot arm that could lift up a paper cup.

They did it!

The children enjoyed paper marbling so much during our Marbled Jupiter activity that they really wanted to do it again. This time we had three different color schemes to make Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth. (Instructions are here.)

It was definitely a more committed craft project than I'd attempt on a regular day—but this was a celebration day, so…I guess it was worth it. :)

When I found this "Build a cardboard rover" activity I knew we had to try it for the sake of our Rover-loving Teddy. I don't know what it was, but when we learned about the Mars Rovers, he just fell in love. He plays that he is a Rover, and he says he wants to go to Mars and take care of the Rovers when he grows up. He especially loves Curiosity, and still asks me almost daily if Curiosity is still working and going around up on Mars! (So far, the answer is yes!) We are pretty excited to watch the launch of the new Mars Rover in July.

The instructions for this "cardboard rover" are here. (Basically, it's just a rubber-band-powered car, with square "all-terrain" wheels.) It's really simple to make…though somehow walking several children through a project manages to be quite an involved process no matter how simple it is…sigh. Once we had our Rovers assembled they really liked iterating on ways to make them go faster or longer. Hard surfaces worked best!

Daisy made the cutest little mini robot arm to go on her Rover. It was jointed and moved just like our big robot arms!

Here's the robot arm in action!

We made these simple paper rockets, found here at Rising Wonder.

I had the bigger kids help me make these little "jet-packs," just for fun, for the little boys. (We didn't have enough 2-liter bottles for everyone, and we knew the little boys would have the most fun playing with them.) I don't even know where the original idea came from; these were everywhere when I searched "space party ideas." I didn't find written instructions but just looked at a picture and figured it out. Basically, you spray paint two two-liter bottles silver, duct tape them together, glue on some felt "flames," and attach straps like a backpack. Easy. The girls really loved helping spray paint and glue, and then presenting the "surprise" to Ziggy and Teddy with great fanfare!

I found a 9-pack of these planet necklaces for $12 on Amazon, so I ordered them and let the children divide them among themselves. They are really pretty!

I also thought it would be a really fun activity to make planet bracelets like this one. I ended up just ordering a couple because I didn't want to go to the craft store for beads during quarantine. But I still think it would be great to make your own—search for beads to represent each planet, and then string them together on bracelet elastic. Part of the fun is that it just looks like a cute bead bracelet—but YOU would know that it represents our Solar System. Fun!

Picture of the Solar System Goldie drew (I wish you could see all the little details)

 

Teddy's meticulous solar system. Note Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Saturn's hexagonal storm, and the tiny Mars Rovers (Curiosity and Opportunity) on Mars!

These various activities took us ALL DAY and were actually a lot more work than I was anticipating, interspersed with nursing Gussie and trying to keep the house from falling apart! But on the upside, it did really feel like a Day Of Fun! 

After we got all the activities cleaned up, we ended by making mini pizzas for dinner—Jupiter pizzas, of course!

It was actually pretty hard to keep a Jupiter-ish striped-cloud look after the pizza was cooked. Our nice lines of cheese all melted together! Luckily…they tasted great anyway. :)

And I had ordered this astronaut ice cream for dessert!

Robot Celebration

Our robot celebration was one of our best ever—if I do say so myself. :) I am not much of a "party planner" so the bar was set very low, but we had so much fun! The older boys made themselves into robots out of old boxes we had lying around. They went around talking in robot voices and it was very cute. They also printed out a bunch of pictures of our favorite robots, and hung them up to make a "Wall of Robots" in the kitchen.

Half the fun was getting ready for the party. We made a few box robots as decorations.

I had Abraham help me make these little tin-can robots for all the other children. We used them to hold silverware at dinner, and then the children used them for keeping various little treasures in.

Malachi drew some robot pictures to put up on the wall.

If you search "Robot Party" on Pinterest, you will find tons of great party ideas, nearly all of them more beautiful and elaborate than I felt confident trying to re-create. But a common theme was a "Build-a-bot" station where the children could make robots out of various things. Sometimes they used rice crispie treats as a base, or sandwiches, or whatever. We decided to use toothpicks and marshmallows and a few little candies as the robot components:

The children made some cute robots.

We had a good robot-y dinner based on other ideas from pinterest. To be specific:

• Pineapple Smoothie or "motor oil"
• Screw-shaped pasta with mizithra cheese
• Small corn chips or "microchips" (the mini chocolate chips we used to "build-a-bot" were even smaller, so we called those "nanochips" :))
• Cheez-its crackers or "washers"
• Almonds or "nuts." I saw lots of "nuts-and-bolts" trail mix/chex mix ideas, but the crackers really look more like washers than bolts, don't they?
• Peas or "fuel cells." This one is the weak link since they don't really look much like batteries. But maybe like those small button kind?

And this grand robot donut "cake" for dessert! We thought he was so funny and cute. I got the brilliant idea here.

We watched "Big Hero 6" after dinner, and I made one of these little slinky "robots" (as pictured here: no instructions, but easy enough to figure out) for each of the kids. (You can get a bunch of slinkies fairly cheaply here.) They ate their rolos and mints and tic-tacs during the movie and thought it was the most exciting day ever.

Other movies we considered: "Wall-E" and "The Iron Giant." But we loved "Big Hero 6."

This was an awesome unit! We learned so much, and we didn't want it to end!

Cool Robot Videos

Here are some videos we enjoyed of various types of robots.

Funny little robo-footstool that comes to get under your feet.

This homemade robot talks and answers questions.

Tiny snow-plowing robot.

This one is a gas-sampling robot.

Robotic hand with Arduino.

Ping-pong robot!

This one is really cool, made with a box and Arduino.

Robot exoskeleton

And another exoskeleton suit, built in Utah!

A cute little baby penguin robot! Daisy loved this one.

This origami robot is great—he folds himself up and walks away!

We really loved the "BEAR" (battlefield extraction-assist robot) that's been developed for use in the armed forces. It can carry injured soldiers off the battlefield and disarm weapons, among other things. Here are three videos showing how it works:
An overview
Part 1
Part 2

ASIMO is another of our favorite robots. He's so cute! Here are some ASIMO videos:
Here
Here
Here

This little guy, Jibo, is a new robot still in development. We like him too.

Printer Robot

Some of our friends gave Seb an old printer to take apart. The printer motor still worked, so he hooked it up to a battery and made this funny little spinning "robot." :) 

Passive-dynamic mini-walker robot

This little guy is a passive-dynamic robot walker we made (meaning that he works through gravity and balance alone, not by a battery or anything). He was not entirely successful but we liked him anyway. It was interesting to see how the little feet could be induced down a slope. Lots of simple robots use this principle.

We learned how to make this walker from this book (great book, by the way!), and you can download .pdf instructions here.

Here's another (better) video of one of these walking.

You can also see one here.

Our version:

Lego Mindstorms

We deliberated for a long time before getting the Lego Mindstorms robots, because they are expensive! But we finally decided to use some school money to get this kit. Sam convinced me that the study of robotics is important enough in many future science-related careers that it would be a good investment for our children. And so far, we love it! Abe (age 12) has been learning HTML from a book he got for Christmas, and he also has learned Scratch with Boy Scouts, so the Lego programming language was really easy for him to pick up. But Seb (age 9), who didn't have a lot of prior experience, has been able to learn a lot about programming too. 

They have built the robots from the instruction manuals, but they especially love building their own robots and programming them. And Malachi (age 7) likes to watch and help the older boys program, and especially to use the remote control to move the robots around. They are really fun and I'm glad we bought them.

I particularly liked this cute little guy.