Designing a Cardboard Robot Workshop for Educational Centers
A few months ago, HEVELIANUM Educational Center from Gdańsk commissioned me to design a workshop and a cardboard robot specially for them.
I really loved this opportunity and have to say that it is the type of project I strongly hoped would come when I was starting Cardboard Robots :-)
Hevelianum is an educational center for kids with a main exhibition built around science and astronomy due to its patron – Jan Heveliusz – a famous local astronomer from the seventeenth century who created maps of the moon and had a prosperous brewery business ;-)
Hevelianum has an ongoing offer of workshops for individuals and organized groups, and I am preparing a new one for their lineup.
The workshops have to be short and give participants a chance to build a robot in 45 minutes.
So, what goes into a workshop like this?
Well, here’s the breakdown:
- Robot idea
- Stencil to draw robot template
- Building manual to print
- Workshop methodology and “flow”
What is often overlooked is that the thing I call workshop “flow” is much more important than the actual activity and outcome itself. First, we want participants to have “time well spent”; the “physical outcome” is secondary.
Another “not-so-obvious fact” is that “time well spent” refers to participants (of course) but also to educators and animators! After all, they will have to repeat the workshop dozens of times – it has to be functional and only then can it be fun.
Workshop participants will be building a cardboard robot, and it will come in two versions:
- Without electronics – building a robot figurine in 45 minutes
- Building a walking robot with BBC Micro:Bit electronics and playing some robotics games with it, such as football matches and sumo fights – this will take about 90 minutes
A great advantage of cardboard robots for this kind of workshop is that when participants build a robot figurine without electronics, they can take it home after the workshop – the cost of materials for one robot is less than a quarter of a dollar – after all, it is just a small sheet of cardboard and a few nuts and bolts.
How to design a cardboard robot for a workshop?
It has to be …cool.
But, more importantly, it has to be simple.
Building something on your own at home is a completely different experience from leading a group of teenagers to build it.
And as the time span is very limited, the design has to be as minimal as possible.
But then again, let’s start with making something interesting enough to be worth building.
Can I take one piece of cardboard and fold it into a robot head?
It seems that I can, and after some iterations, I had this first prototype.
With some further improvements I made versions with and without electronics.
It looks quite nice and is fun to build – but it is FAR TOO COMPLEX for a workshop.
It takes me about 25 minutes to build it, so it will take about an hour for a newcomer, and a workshop also needs at least 10 minutes of introduction, so we are way past the planned time span.
What about astronomy?
The overarching topic of Hevelianum is astronomy and space exploration, so including it somehow in a robot design would be a nice touch.
Maybe adding something like a telescope or lunette? Well, I tried, but the shape didn’t fit in well, and the risk of silly jokes around it rose dangerously.
How about a nod to the HEVELIANUM brand?
We can give the letter H a chance – it looks almost like a four-legged torso.
And now let’s add a head to it.
Well … now we deffinitely have to do something with this head.
With a few takes I ended up with something similar to what I had in robot droid
Next up were some experiments with the proper size.
I usually make all the corner rounded and smooth in most of my designs but this time keeping it sharp and pointy was aligned with Hevelianum typography
