The other day little Bear has missed an online MuDa workshop, which was about robots. This made him really sad and I promised we find something similar ourselves. So we started to search on the internet and found a video about how to make a robotic arm.
We had a great time making it, but this project is more suitable for older kids. Little Bear, who is 6 years old took his part in the making, but he enjoyed even more the end result.
But for a bit older kids this is a great project to work on, even on their own.
The idea is to make a cardboard robotic arm, where the robot fingers work as your fingers.
You can watch and follow the video link here, but I will share our experience during this long project.
(https://www.buzzfeed.com/tigersouvannakoumane/make-your-own-robotic-hand-with-this-geeky-diy?utm_term=.ghvrvmzEN#.yt6w4NA7G)
We started placing a hand on a cardboard and marked it around. I suggest to use a larger hand, maybe the parent's hand, so the robotic arm becomes larger than the kid's arm. We cut it out and followed the instructions to glue the plastic straw pieces to the carton. We did not have hot glue at home, so used just normal liquid glue, but left it dry overnight.
Next day, when we started to pull the strings through the straw pieces, the small plastic pieces started to pop off, so it was obvious they would not stand being pulled during the use of the robot arm.
So we turned to our plan B and replaced the small pieces with paper straw. Somehow the larger plastic pieces stuck ok, so we just left them in their place.
Cutting the straws is an opportunity for a six years old to participate actively and little Bear did this all alone. So was the part with the strings, where his little fingers were perfect to pull the string through the several little straw pieces.
Now we just had to set the proper length of the strings.
The only thing we did not manage to make work was the thumb, because the string has to make several turns and a little hand is not strong enough to pull just by moving his own thumb. Even with this little error, little Bear is absolutely happy with his robotic arm.
Hi Timea, great idea! We noticed this project in our tasks for MissionX, Training like an astronaut with the European Space Agency, too.
We followed your model and also talked about how the straws represent the bones, the strings are the tendons and the muscles are where the real fingers are. What a neat project!
(Also, we didn’t have any straws but paper rolled and taped around a pen seems to work just fine). -Elise