Teen Tech Week in Albuquerque

In honor of TeenTechWeek, I hosted a robot-building program for Albuquerque area teens yesterday at the Main library. The idea was to build Bristlebots, a la EvilMadScientist & race them for fabulous prizes (books!). I ordered pager vibrator motors & batteries on-line & got a bunch of toothbrushes from the dollar store. I also had googly eyes, LED’s & toothpicks (spikes)  to glue on for decoration. The overall price was somewhere around $1.50 per bot. I built a little track designed to help the robots go in a straight line & we were ready to go!

The prototype I built at home based on EvilMadScientist’s instructions worked beautifully. Unfortunately, it ended up being pretty hard for a bunch of middle-schoolers to reproduce. I deviated slightly from the instructions in order to avoid at-home prep work. Bad idea. Out of the 12+ attempted ‘bots, we only had 5 ready to race at the end of the day (& 2 of them were mine & the other librarian’s – sad). Nevertheless, the teens seemed to have a lot of fun with it, so we’re calling it a success.

I plan on doing it again as a summer reading program, but I’ll need to ‘tweak’ my process a little bit. The biggest problem seemed to be in getting a solid connection between the wire leads & the terminals on the motors. I hadn’t actually soldered my wires to the leads; I only bent them on tightly. I think next time I’ll have to spend some time at home soldering leads to motors before the program – maybe that will work better.