Saturday, June 9, 2012

Inspiration For Those Harvesting Our Future

Today I got to meet a fellow Robot Geek, Joe Beam, who brought his 8 year old daughter along (also enthusiastic about robots). I am seeing an increasing desire in little girls to program and build and hack and get their hands dirty and their minds strong. I can only hope that any parent (especially fathers) who see this in their little girls please please please buy them some LEGO blocks and help them put together their first tool kits. Please do this for the future of our species. Thank you.



1 comment:

  1. My 9-yr-old (then 7) daughter and I put together a simple Snap-Circuits radio... that inspired her to learn more. Naturally, I've dropped the ball on building her new project. We have the parts, I just lack the "MacGuyver-tude" and time to commit. But I promise, we will nail this thing this summer. Work seems to always take over.

    We're building a Knock-lock Journal Box from a Book-like box we bought at Hobby Lobby, a Servo, an Arduino misc extra bits. We'll use a piezo element to sense a knock, some existing code to detect the correct knock pattern (based on Steve Hoefer's Secret Knock Gumball Machine: http://makezine.com/25/gumball/index.csp). The servo will unlock the box by rotating a locking pin out of position. We are building in a backup power supply just in case, and have considered making a few other "unlock" variations (Maybe colored light pattern? Maybe order of switches clicked? We can do this all day).

    Wish us luck!

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