Creating Automata with VEX GO and IQ
In this Live Session, Aimee shares ways to create automata (moving mechanical devices or toys) using different linkages with VEX GO and IQ pieces along with craft materials. She explains how linkages are collections of parts with pivot points or other moving parts joined together to change or help movement. Linkages and automata are explained in context as Aimee shares four different examples including a ladybug with moving wings, a talking box puppet, a swimming whale, and monkeys jumping on the bed. She also offers ideas for extensions and ways to facilitate students using linkages to create automata into your learning environment.
(soft music)
Hi everybody. My name is Aimee, and this is our Makerspaces for Creative Learning Live Session. I am super, super excited to be here tonight because I've had an absolute blast making some samples for tonight's activity. The ideas I'm going to share with you involve using VEX GO and VEX IQ pieces to create some really fun linkages. Your students can then use these to make amazing Automata by combining them with craft supplies or whatever else you have in your makerspace. I think I've packed this session with a lot of content. Even though we're waiting for a few more people, I'm going to go ahead and start, and hopefully, they can join us when they get here.
Alright, so I'm going to get started. Here is our agenda for this hour. I'm going to share a little bit of background information about linkages and Automata to give you a frame of reference. Then, I'll talk about why VEX GO and VEX IQ parts are so great for this project. I'll share some examples of projects that I made for you, which you can use in many ways in your own makerspace. Then, I'll give you a closer look at some of the mechanisms in the linkages. We're going to make a talking box, and I'll take apart a Ladybug Automata so you can see how it works. Hopefully, I'll have time to demonstrate how to make a whale Automata, which I think is really cute and is my favorite. I'll give you some extra tips and tricks, wrap up, and hopefully leave some time for questions. If you have a question during this session, just type it into the chat, and we will make sure to get it answered for you.
Alright, quickly, I'm going to give you just a tiny bit of background information about linkages. Linkages are collections of parts joined together to change or help movement. I've included two pictures that are examples of the kinds of linkages we're playing around with tonight. In the first one, you can see both fixed and moving pivots, which we'll use to make a couple of different fun things. Then, there's a crank and slider mechanism where a rotating piece moves other straight pieces. You'll see these things later on in this session.
In case you are not familiar with Automata, they're not an unusual maker project for people. It's basically a moving mechanical device. In this situation, we're making them into mechanical sculptures or toys. There are lots of artists who do this work. I'm just going to click on this video to give you a little taste of what artists are doing. If you've never seen Automata before, you'll know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure if you'll be able to hear this, but it's okay if you don't because you'll get the idea. I'll define Automata as a moving cartoon. That's the best word to describe it. (indistinct)
I've never done anything else. I've always made Automata since I was about 15, so I've never had a real job as it were. Just a little taste of what some artists are doing with these kinds of Automata mechanical devices. It's really incredible. If you look them up on the internet, you can go down an incredible rabbit hole trying to find some really cool artists using these ideas. You can also find some fantastic projects for kids using basically cardboard and other things to make Automata. I've included in the slideshow, which I will share with you, a link to a tinkering studio webpage from the Exploratorium. They have all kinds of great examples that you can take with you and use to create your own Automata waiter. Making Automata is great for a makerspace.
Thank you all for joining this session. I hope you found it informative and inspiring. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further assistance. Have a great evening!
You can use them to explore simple machines, you can explore mechanical principles, and you can make really fun artistic dioramas that can illustrate all kinds of scenes, whether it's something from someone's imagination or from a book that they're reading or from something that they're doing in school. You could definitely use them to share social studies concepts, and you can use them for storytelling. So, I think there's pretty much infinite possibilities for what you could do with Automata in your makerspace or even in your classroom.
Alright, so why will we use VEX GO or IQ parts for Automata? The main reason is that it's just really super easy to test out different designs and linkages with these pieces, these are IQ pieces, because they're so easy to take apart and put together. You'll see in a lot of projects people are using cardboard and pins for this or even wood, and that works great but it's a lot more effort. If you're a kid just trying to figure out what kind of mechanism you want to make, you can easily just take it apart, put it back together, and change the positions of where you're linking things together quickly to see how it changes the movement. So, using GO and IQ pieces is really ideal, and if you happen to have older kids that maybe want to actually make them more permanent and want them to be made out of wood or cardboard, this is a great way to prototype. You can make some linkages with VEX GO or IQ pieces as prototypes before the students really commit to actually making something out of wood or cardboard or something a little bit more permanent. So, I think it's a really great way to get started with Automata.
Alright, so I have four really fun examples to share with you. I might have overdone it a little bit, but I got really excited about this. One of them is the talking box. I've got this talking box here, and the mouth can open and close. It kind of looks like a weird puppet to me. This is a really super easy one that we're going to look at first in a minute.
And I've also got a ladybug here that can fly, well she can't really fly, but her wings can open and close, oops. So that's this one. What I've done here is choose two different types of linkages to share with you. These two, the talking box and the ladybug, are of the same type, which are just basically beams that are held together. They've got, of course, pivot points right here, right? And then there's always a fixed point. Right now I'm holding the top with my fingers to make it the fixed point, and the rest of all the places where there's a joint are pivoting. So that's this kind of linkage that I made. What I've done with these is actually attach them by poking them through the box.
The other kind I made, the other two examples, I'm gonna move the ladybug, are a little bit more complex. What I've done, and let me do top down here so you can see, is actually make sort of a background plate using plates from the GO and the IQ kits and then attached my mechanism to that. This one is more of a crank and slider. So back to front here. You can see I'm turning, and there's a knob in the back, and I'll show you this more closely in a minute, but it's making the whale move. Still really easy to build but maybe slightly more complex.
And then the last one is just, I don't know if you can see this, but I was trying to make some monkeys jumping on the bed. Let me give you a top down here. If I turn it this way, you can see it a little bit better. There we go. Move out of the way, move this out of the way. You can see this is sort of my bed, and I made a pillow and some really great headboard stuff, but I tried, and then they can jump. With this lever here, there's a mechanism inside that allows them to jump up and down, and I'll show you that too.
And this one is also of the type that I've made some plates and anchored them to the mechanism to the box that way. I will hopefully be able to take this apart for you if we have time and show you how I did it. But if not, I will definitely make sure I post in the Community the details about it, 'cause this one is last and we might not quite get there, but we'll see.
All right, so I wanted to start with the talking box because I think it's the easiest one to do and there's so many possibilities with it. The mechanism that's in here is actually this. So let me top down again. This is the mechanism that's inside the talking box. It's just basically these five IQ pieces attached together, and that's all that's happening. You can see I've just put these cardboard lips over it, right? I've poked it through the box and they can open and close. Maybe it's better this way, right side up. There we go.
All right, so what I'm gonna do right now is just demonstrate to you how to make this, it's not hard at all. I have some semi-prepped pieces here for us, some glue dots. My idea here was to make this one actually look like a cat. So that's what I'm gonna try here. I've just got a regular old box, I cut the back out of it. You don't even have to cut quite this much, but I did for this so you can see it a little bit better. Then I just covered the front with a piece of blue paper so that it wasn't quite so ugly. That's all I've done so far.
What you need to do is think first about the kind of linkage that you're using, right? When you're doing this with kids, you can have them make some different linkages. You can go online and find different examples. There are hundreds of them, many good websites and also YouTube channels that show how to do this, how these different mechanisms are made in engineering contexts and things like that. You can have kids make a few of them and try them out and then play a little bit with how they move.
Before you're ever thinking about what you're gonna make, you need to look at the mechanism and think about what the movement is. What does it remind you of? To me, this immediately reminded me of a mouth, right? But maybe it reminds other people of something else. That's what this looked like to me. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna make this into something that talks. But if I start out with thinking like, oh, I'm gonna make something that talks, it's a little bit harder. I would encourage you to have kids make the mechanisms and then decide what they think they could actually turn into. That's what I did.
Another consideration is the size of the box that you have. You want to think about something that fits on the box, like this one's maybe a little bit big for this box. It would work, but I wanted to make a cat and it doesn't need to be this big. I was hoping to actually make its body on here too. I'm not gonna have time to do that right now, but I could do it, right? One of the things for kids is to help them think about the size of beams that they want to use in relation to make the right size mechanism for their box. It's a really great spatial reasoning thing to be thinking about and it might take them a few tries to figure out what the scale is 'cause it doesn't really come naturally and that's fine.
I would say also with all of these projects there's a lot of testing and trial and error. A lot of iterative problem solving. The iterations are really fast 'cause you're just taking this apart and putting it back together a bunch of times. But it took me a few times to figure out how I wanted to do things or the best ways to do things or what some really cool ways to use the VEX parts were. It's gonna take kids some time to do that too and that's great, that's totally fine.
I would let them explore through it, don't show them exactly how to do it. You know, give them a picture of the mechanism and say how would you use these VEX pieces to make the mechanism so that they are doing the problem solving and they're not just being told exactly how to put this together. So that's really the big learning part of it and the part of the maker mindset that you can get from doing this kind of project is having to work through that to solve your problem in a way that's kind of fun and challenging but also motivating. So we don't wanna give them too much information about how to do this. And I can talk more about that in the Community if anybody wants to discuss that.
Okay, so anyway, I decided I was gonna make a cat and I decided I was gonna make it a little bit smaller than this. So what I've got is some VEX GO pieces here, which I've already attached two of them together, but just to show you, all I'm doing is just taking a red pin and putting the two pieces together, super simple. It makes a little hinge, really easy. All right, so I did that and then I've got some other pieces here. So I've got some shafts and some shaft collars because what I did with this other one, which is the mouth, is that I poked holes through like a slit here through the box and a hole here. And then I just stuck the VEX GO shafts through my pieces and anchored them to the box with a shaft collar. It was really easy and it only took a minute.
So that's what we're gonna do right here. We need there to be a fixed pivot up here. And then this one is gonna be free. And the reason it's free, well not the reason it's free, but what's gonna make it free is having a slit here in the box. So you're gonna have to think about what size of shaft you wanna use. I'm not sure if this one's big enough, so I'm gonna give it a try here and see what happens. So I'm gonna stick it through here. I already poked a hole in my box before this session because I didn't wanna worry about stabbing myself honestly. Let me see if it is gonna work. Yeah, so there's enough space here on the other side to fit the shaft collar on.
But if you were curious about how I knew where to poke the hole and make the cut, what I did was I just got my pieces, I laid them here on the box and I played with a mechanism trying to figure out like how far down did I want it to go. I'm picturing this as a mouth, right? So how far down do I want the mouth to open and how far up do I want it to go? So I'm trying to picture like, oh you know, do I need to make it really close or do I wanna leave some room here to have the lips of my mouth so that there's something, so that they don't overlap 'cause that wouldn't look very good. So I'm just sort of thinking about that as I go.
And then once I sort of figure it out how far the movement, how much movement I want, I kind of looked at how far it was, looked like it was a little bit more than an inch. And then I just cut a slit in the box. A ruler can be a great tool, but you can also use VEX piece as a ruler or a straight edge. You can use the little bumps here to count centimeters if you want to, so you don't have to have a ruler.
All right, so I did that and then where is my other shaft? Okay, I'm gonna put this one through here and into the slit that I made, flip over my box and then I'm gonna put shaft colors on both of these shafts. And this one doesn't have to be tight down here because it's gonna move through here. But the other one which I just popped out does have to be tight because that's the fixed point and I don't want it to move. So I'm gonna press that chap color on there. And there you go.
All right, so now I have my little mechanism moving up and down and it could go a little further, but for now that's fine. And then I can do it from the back, right, so you can't really see what I'm doing.
Thank you for following along with this project. If you have any questions or want to share your own creations, feel free to reach out in the Community. Happy building!
And then after that, you're gonna go ahead and think about what the art parts of your mechanism are going to be. So I wanted to try to make a cat, and I am not the world's greatest drawer, so you're gonna have to bear with me here. But what I did was I tried to make a little kitty nose to put up here. I added a few little pipe cleaner whiskers and a little kitty mouth to put down here.
You've got a few choices. You can make a hole and kind of just stab it through here, which is what I'm gonna do. If you don't wanna do that, you don't have to. You could also add a glue dot and just stick it on there. You can do a little bit of experimenting and problem-solving to see what works for you. And you can also figure out where you want to position it. So if it's all the way closed, there's the top of my mouth, there's the bottom of my little mouth, and it looks like that. That's pretty good.
So actually, I'm just gonna hold this here, and I have a pencil back here somewhere, and I'm just gonna put a little dot right under there where the shaft was touching. And if I was smart, I would've brought a hole puncher in here, but I did not. So I am going to use this screwdriver, which works very well too. And I'm just gonna poke a little hole and stick it on there. There it is. I can also anchor it, but I need to anchor it really close to the pivot point, right? So if I wanted to put a little glue on here so it didn't swivel, I could. I'm not gonna take the time to do that now, but I gotta be careful where I anchor it. Like I don't wanna accidentally anchor the corner of this mouth up here, right? Because this has to move down. So you have to make sure that it can still move freely wherever you anchor your pieces.
All right, same thing for the top. So I'm gonna put a little pencil dot kind of right, I can see like where it is on the little mouse. I'm gonna poke a hole with my screwdriver and push that through there. Got some whiskers going crazy. I made a couple of eyes, which I'm gonna add with these blue dots, which are like a game changer if you can get them out of the box. Sorry, box. Okay, so one little blue dot here for my cat eye, I'll be right there. One little blue dot here. Just got the plastic part.
All right, now I have a kind of maniacal looking cat here that I have made. And of course, I could go do a lot more, right? Like I could make the cat's body, I could make a tail, I could put fur on it, like I could go crazy with a glue gun and some fake fur, some yarn. It would be really fun. But right now I just have this cat that can talk. So I can make this cat tell the story. I can make the cat do math problems, I can make the cat sing, like whatever I wanna do. And it was really easy and quick. And here's the back if you wanna see it, that's all there is.
So this is something that you know, your second and third graders can do with help. They can certainly draw all the pieces and parts, and it would be so much fun I think to do in the makerspace. So there we go. That is how to make a quick and easy talking box.
All right, I'm gonna set this cat aside and then I'm gonna get out my ladybug. Actually, I'm gonna try to clean up some of my area here just a little bit. All right, if this got this very large ladybug here and the mechanism for the ladybug is actually this one. So this right here where my fingers are would be the fixed point and the rest are pivot points.
When I was playing with this one and looking at it, the way that it moves to me looks like wings. So I was thinking about what I can make, and of course, a bird is an obvious choice, but I was like, well why not a beetle because everyone is gonna think of a bird I guess. But you could certainly make a really cool looking flying bird with it. So the ladybug is just that mechanism. Again, on the back, it's hard to see, but right here there's a shaft here that's got a shaft collar on it that's holding the top, the fixed point onto my box.
I cut a big long strip here because it was such a big mechanism that I needed a long distance for this to travel. And it's the same thing, another shaft, but this time I just put a little gear on it to hold it on. So then I slide it, that's all that's happening.
And then just so you can see, I'm actually gonna take off these super sparkly wings here so you can see what I did. These are just duct taped on. I can do something, you know, a little bit more fancy, but this works just fine. After all, I don't wanna put hot glue on my VEX pieces, so duct tape is a pretty, pretty good holder.
So I put it on there and take off the head, and you can see this isn't actually really anything, I just put this on here so I had something to attach the head to. But here's my mechanism and it's going like this. So you might wonder what this yellow thing is and why this is here is that because these two beams are not completely flat, the wings were like offset and it looked weird and it wasn't moving right.
I solved that problem by just adding a little height right here to the linkage, to the mechanism, by just adding another little VEX GO beam on here. And I've done this a few places in these different Automata, and it's worked really well to like even things out or to hold things off the back of the box if I need a little height or just another little piece, no one's gonna see it. And then I actually attached my wing to that piece when I attached it.
When I did attach the wings, I had the mechanism as closed, this is as closed as I have it here. And I held my wings and I sort of figured out how, where to put the tape so that they would be mostly centered, which I think I kind of just got them off-centered. But that's the idea. And the head is just a piece of card stock attached. Another really easy fun linkage that you can turn into all kinds of different things.
I'm sure also your kids are gonna think of ideas that you would never think of, ways to use the pieces that you've never thought of. All kinds of things that we don't think of, the kids think of. So you give them some ideas and plant some seeds and show them some different mechanisms and let them play with how to make some of these things. They're gonna have all kinds of ideas about what they can turn these into.
All right, the next example, gonna move the ladybug. So we're moving now into this other way of doing things that requires the creation of like a background plate. So we're gonna do the wave writing whale, here we go.
And so on the back, and by the way, this does not need to be this long, this shaft that I put through here, it's just the one that was at hand. If I were gonna make it again, I would use a smaller one. But for now, that's what it is. So to make the mechanism work, I'm turning the orange VEX GO knob. But if I look inside here, I can see what's happening.
So this is that crank and slider mechanism. Oops, here we go. This is, hold it up a little bit. What's happening here is this linkage is converting rotational input right here with this crank into linear movement. So you see the linear movement there of the black beam, and that allows for a limited range of motion for our little whale who's riding the waves here.
All right, so I am going to demo this one too. So we'll put him aside. And I've got a bunch of pieces here. I'm not gonna actually make the whale, I'm just gonna show you how I made this linkage. Let's see what makes sense here. Well, we'll leave it like this for now.
So the first thing I'm gonna show you is how I made like the background sort of piece anchor piece out of GO pieces. And you know, of course, you can do the exact same thing with IQ pieces. The reason that I did this is that you can make some of these and then anchor different mechanisms onto them and then again change them out and experiment with them pretty easily.
Thank you for watching and I hope you found this demonstration helpful. Feel free to reach out with any questions or ideas. Happy building!
If you look online, you will see that some people do this kind of thing with peg boards. So it's just kind of a simulated pegboard more or less. For this, all I did was layout the pieces and the size that I wanted, again, taking into consideration the size of my box, right? I knew I had a box that was yay big, and I had to make something that fit inside there. I looked through my GO pieces and found these plates that seemed to be the right size.
Now, all I'm gonna do is just real quick put them together with some pins and some other GO pieces so that they're like one cohesive part. I like to do this because I can get all three of these corners anchored at the same time. Then I'm gonna put another one of these down here. I don't want them to move, but if they're not completely solid, it's not gonna be the end of the world. Put this guy on there. How are they doing? I mean, that's pretty solid right there with just those two little red plates. If I wanted to, I could put some more things here and here, but I really think it's gonna be fine. So there we go.
I also did that for the monkeys jumping on the bed example that I'm gonna show you. I just made a slightly bigger one because the box was slightly bigger. All right, so once I had this, what I need then is to actually take this out of here because I can always put it back, but if I take it out, you'll be able to see it a little bit better. Sorry, Mr. Whale. Or maybe you know what I'll do is I'll just take off the artsy bits. It's coming out. It's coming out. Try not to break it too much. Okay, so here we go. So you can really get an idea of this mechanism. I'm gonna put this back through here. Oops, the wrong way just so you can see.
Now I played around a lot with exactly where I was gonna put my gear, where I was gonna put these pins that keep this beam in place. It'll make a difference, right? So right there doesn't work, there's not enough room for it to move. So I had to keep playing around a little bit, figuring out where is the right hole to put this through. So you will have to do that too. Your students will have to do it. Ah, sorry. Okay, but let's just make one. So here we go. Here's basically what it looks like. All it is for these pieces put together with pins. And again, there's different possibilities for movement depending on what size pieces you use and how you put them together. But very simply just put together like this. Can you see that? There we go.
Now you have to anchor, you gotta have your fixed point, right? So I'm gonna put a fixed point right here and just anchor my orange beam on there. Then I have to figure out the movement part, right? So this is gonna go around and around like this, and this is what the whale would be attached to and what would allow the whale to have this fun little up and down movement like it's riding the waves. I can just experiment here and look a little bit about how is this the end of this long black beam moving and how can that help me figure out where, there we go, to attach it on this background. So let's just first of all anchor it.
I'm taking the red pin and I'm putting it, I'm actually, I have this flipped over. So with these go gears, there's like a recessed side and a flatter side, but I used the flatter side because I needed it to spin smoothly and I didn't think that was gonna work over here because the pin would not be sticking out quite far enough. So again, that was something I played around with. I was like, oh, does this work? Well nope, let's flip it over and try. And that's the kind of problem solving your kids can do too. All right, so I'm sticking that in there, putting that here or, and see it can rotate. The little beam is rotating around because it's not stuck in the middle, it's stuck on one of the side holes. And now my job is to figure out where I want it to go in this plate. So let's just try it in different places.
So this is like not the right piece, that's part of my problem. Okay, here we go. So I am going to stick it through this hole and see what happens if I crank it. That's not working 'cause this is in the way. Come through the back. So this is kind of a trial and error part of things. Oops. There we go. So that doesn't give a whole lot of movement, right? It's a little bit, I mean, it's moving but it's not quite what I would want. So I'm gonna try moving it over a little bit, moving it down.
This part of things is just playing around and figuring out what works, what is working for you. Is it the right movement that you want or is it not? So I spent a while playing around with this and that looks pretty good to me. Now also you can use these connectors as sort of pins that keep this black beam in place. So I'm just gonna put that one there and then I'm gonna test it again, look at how it's moving. Think about where I want my other connector. So I can't put it right here 'cause of these red pins, but I could put it up here and it will kind of keep that in place.
All right, so now, there we go. I'm having trouble with this now. Trying to hold it and show you and it's harder than you might think. All right, there we go. So let me spin it and yeah, that looks pretty good. So I could attach a whale to this part if I wanted to or something else. A giant sea monster coming out of the water or a dragon. I mean anything that your kids can think of, they can attach to it. And then I just put this whole thing through the box and added this crank or the orange knob, not crank but it's working like a crank, the orange knob to the back here to twist it. And that is how I made that mechanism.
And then with the box you can see, I mean this is not like the most beautiful cutting job, but I just cut out a big enough hole there for that mechanism to rotate through freely. So you have to make sure that like these little cardboard bits aren't getting in the way 'cause that's annoying and you have to make sure that it goes long enough so that the motion can happen. But that's basically it. And then the only other hole that I poked was the hole for the shaft to go through. And I did it the same way. I like sort of stuck it in there, lined it up, thought about where I wanted it to go, drew a pencil dot and just stabbed it with a screwdriver.
And then I simply taped, like this is just a piece of packaging tape and it has stayed up until today and I made this like three days ago. So I basically just taped, I'm just gonna tape this up real quick, tape this in here where I wanted it. And you could use duct tape or whatever else. I'll show you a couple other cool tricks for anchoring things into cardboard that I came up with. So you can anchor stuff to cardboard. I showed you this earlier with a shaft and a shaft collar, right? That's really easy. You can also use pieces that have like a connector that have two little pins sticking out the back and then take a beam or any other VEX GO or VEX IQ piece really and just press it on there. And now this is anchored through there and you know, just by making this little example to show you I got a bunch of other ideas, right? Like this is a really easy way to make something that spins.
So if you were doing this project with really young children, like a first or second grader, you could help them make these and then have them come up with little, you know, some kind of scenario that would spin that they could add to this, they could make it into a fan, they could make it into like a little merry-go-round. They could put more than one piece on here. There's a bunch of things you could do.
And then these pieces here, maybe if you guys like this idea, I might actually turn this into something for our next session. I realize it would be really fun to create a marble run by anchoring GO and IQ pieces in this manner through some cardboard and, you know, putting the beams. Anyway, you can picture it. There are just a whole bunch of fun ideas that will even arise in your own mind when you play with stuff like this. So if anybody likes that idea about the marble run, let me know, and I'll make one up and share it with you next time.
Alright, so I showed you this mechanism, and I did promise that I would take apart the monkeys on the bed or give you a look into the monkeys on the bed, jumping on the bed. Let me clean up some of these bits, and we will go on from there. I'll fix the whale later. He's so cute. Okay, this out of the way and this out of the way. Last example.
Alright, so it looks like this monkey, let me turn it on the front view again. This one has a lever sticking out the side, one of your simple machines, right? That helps the monkeys jump up and down. This is what you use to work it, and then here is what it looks like on the inside. So that's the back of it. By the way, I made the whale mechanism. You can see, right? I made the whale mechanism facing the audience because I thought it's kind of cool that way, but this is what I made with the mechanism hidden. So you could do it either way, so I'm just gonna kind of take off the bedspread here.
You can see that this is really, it's kind of harder to see with IQ pieces because they're darker in color, but this is very similar. There isn't really a gear in it, so it's not really, I don't think it's a crank and slider, but you can see what's happening is this lever is transferring movement into these other two beams, and the two beams are anchored here with this pin. So that's all it is. I actually attached two beams together here to make it long enough to go through my box. That was just basically a choice based on my box size.
Again, if you were doing this with kids and you wanted to kind of simplify things, especially for younger kids, you might just choose a whole bunch of the exact same size boxes so that you can sort of help them know how big of a background plate to make. That's probably what I would do. Yeah, that's definitely what I would do. But, so yeah, you can see it here. My pins are these guys, they're not the connectors. The pieces are a little bit different with VEX GO and VEX IQ. So depending on what you're using, you're gonna use different pieces, but they can all do the same things. So basically that's all that's happening there.
I'm actually gonna see if I can take the whole thing out, take off my monkeys, take off my fabric here. This one is also duct-taped through here or onto the box. So hopefully I can do this without wrecking it really carefully. Yeah. Oh, there we go. Alright, so you can see the skeleton here. Here's just my box with my holes poked through. These were my anchor points. This was something that was holding on one of the shafts on the back. And then here's my little mechanism. I had earlier a piece right here that was blocking this so that it didn't go too far. See, there's a lot of motion that can happen here, but I was limited by the top of my box, and I didn't want this coming down all the way to here. So I ended up using the bottom of the box to brace it. But you could stick a piece in there too to block it so you can see how that works.
So again, what I did was just make this mechanism, look at it, and what did it remind me of? For some reason, it reminded me of monkeys jumping on a bed. So that's what I made.
Encouraging kids to start with a mechanism, build it, and then decide what it reminds them of is a great way to foster creativity. They can figure out how to make things that are the right proportion, make holes in the box, and find a way to anchor it. This is essentially the process. Some of these projects, especially the more involved ones, are suitable for older children. Middle school kids could definitely do it and have a great time. They might still need some help, but that's fine. They can come up with a vision of what they want to do, and you can help them work through the problem-solving needed to achieve it.
Whenever I did a lot of maker space activities with my students, I often had kids with a variety of questions. If they all wanted help at the same time, I would put up a sign-up board for help at the front of the room. I asked them to sign their name and briefly write what they needed help with, so I could call them in order, like a first-come, first-serve system. If I saw that two kids needed help with something similar, I could have them come over and watch me help the other person, so they could see that they were doing similar things and we could work it out together. This saved me a ton of time, and the kids liked it too. This would be one way to facilitate doing this, especially with older kids in your makerspace, if they were working on more complex mechanisms.
All right, let's see. So we did our demos, tips, and tricks. There we go. We talked about the box size. If you're doing it in a maker space, you might want to have different sizes of boxes depending on what size pieces you're using or whether you're using Go or IQ. I used heavy boxes for these, like shoe boxes and random cardboard boxes, but if you use a cereal box, it's easier for younger kids to poke through. That's another really easy possibility. Setting up a hot glue station or helping kids with hot glue can help these things stay together for quite a bit longer.
All right, last thing, and then I'm going to take some questions. Ideas for extending this project include doing these Automata as a great mixed-age project. You could have the older kids make the mechanisms and the younger kids make the decorative or moving parts, like little monkeys or beds. It's a great group project where different people can do different things. If you have students that really need a challenge, they could add motors, sensors, and code these to make them fully functional robots. You could also connect this to books. Anything you're studying could be made into a diorama. These could be used in a study of simple machines, as there are a lot of levers involved. Kids could try several different types of mechanisms, add pulleys, or use 1, 2, 3 and Go in your school to code the 123 robot to spin and act as the crank, then attach GO pieces to the art ring.
I played around a little with that, but I don't really have time to show you. If you like that idea, I can incorporate it into a future maker session as well. That would be a fun multi-age situation, where older kids make the moving parts and younger kids do the 1, 2, 3 parts. I think that would be really cool. You could also use the art ring canvas on 1, 2, 3 to make something that spins around, like a merry-go-round, carousel, or fan.
And also, there's a bunch of math connections that you could do. You could have kids measuring angles in these Automata. You could have them comparing the sizes of pieces and measuring. There's just a ton of things that you could do if you wanted to.
Alright, so we have made it to 7:17. I crammed a ton of stuff into that amount of time. If you have any questions, suggestions, or ideas, now is the time for that. Please let me know, and no worries if not, I can always let you guys go a few minutes early.
All right, so do not forget to share in the PD+ Community thread for this session what you liked about this session, ideas for future sessions, any questions that you have, or materials that you want me to share. Just let me know. I am happy to do so.
I really enjoyed putting this session together and I hope you enjoyed attending it. I will see you back here in our next Makerspaces for Creative Learning Live Session.
Thanks so much for coming.
Hi everybody. My name is Aimee, and this is our Makerspaces for Creative Learning Live Session. I am super, super excited to be here tonight because I've had an absolute blast making some samples for tonight's activity. The ideas I'm going to share with you involve using VEX GO and VEX IQ pieces to create some really fun linkages. Your students can then use these to make amazing Automata by combining them with craft supplies or whatever else you have in your makerspace. I think I've packed this session with a lot of content. Even though we're waiting for a few more people, I'm going to go ahead and start, and hopefully, they can join us when they get here.
Alright, so I'm going to get started. Here is our agenda for this hour. I'm going to share a little bit of background information about linkages and Automata to give you a frame of reference. Then, I'll talk about why VEX GO and VEX IQ parts are so great for this project. I'll share some examples of projects that I made for you, which you can use in many ways in your own makerspace. Then, I'll give you a closer look at some of the mechanisms in the linkages. We're going to make a talking box, and I'll take apart a Ladybug Automata so you can see how it works. Hopefully, I'll have time to demonstrate how to make a whale Automata, which I think is really cute and is my favorite. I'll give you some extra tips and tricks, wrap up, and hopefully leave some time for questions. If you have a question during this session, just type it into the chat, and we will make sure to get it answered for you.
Alright, quickly, I'm going to give you just a tiny bit of background information about linkages. Linkages are collections of parts joined together to change or help movement. I've included two pictures that are examples of the kinds of linkages we're playing around with tonight. In the first one, you can see both fixed and moving pivots, which we'll use to make a couple of different fun things. Then, there's a crank and slider mechanism where a rotating piece moves other straight pieces. You'll see these things later on in this session.
In case you are not familiar with Automata, they're not an unusual maker project for people. It's basically a moving mechanical device. In this situation, we're making them into mechanical sculptures or toys. There are lots of artists who do this work. I'm just going to click on this video to give you a little taste of what artists are doing. If you've never seen Automata before, you'll know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure if you'll be able to hear this, but it's okay if you don't because you'll get the idea. I'll define Automata as a moving cartoon. That's the best word to describe it. (indistinct)
I've never done anything else. I've always made Automata since I was about 15, so I've never had a real job as it were. Just a little taste of what some artists are doing with these kinds of Automata mechanical devices. It's really incredible. If you look them up on the internet, you can go down an incredible rabbit hole trying to find some really cool artists using these ideas. You can also find some fantastic projects for kids using basically cardboard and other things to make Automata. I've included in the slideshow, which I will share with you, a link to a tinkering studio webpage from the Exploratorium. They have all kinds of great examples that you can take with you and use to create your own Automata waiter. Making Automata is great for a makerspace.
Thank you all for joining this session. I hope you found it informative and inspiring. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further assistance. Have a great evening!
You can use them to explore simple machines, you can explore mechanical principles, and you can make really fun artistic dioramas that can illustrate all kinds of scenes, whether it's something from someone's imagination or from a book that they're reading or from something that they're doing in school. You could definitely use them to share social studies concepts, and you can use them for storytelling. So, I think there's pretty much infinite possibilities for what you could do with Automata in your makerspace or even in your classroom.
Alright, so why will we use VEX GO or IQ parts for Automata? The main reason is that it's just really super easy to test out different designs and linkages with these pieces, these are IQ pieces, because they're so easy to take apart and put together. You'll see in a lot of projects people are using cardboard and pins for this or even wood, and that works great but it's a lot more effort. If you're a kid just trying to figure out what kind of mechanism you want to make, you can easily just take it apart, put it back together, and change the positions of where you're linking things together quickly to see how it changes the movement. So, using GO and IQ pieces is really ideal, and if you happen to have older kids that maybe want to actually make them more permanent and want them to be made out of wood or cardboard, this is a great way to prototype. You can make some linkages with VEX GO or IQ pieces as prototypes before the students really commit to actually making something out of wood or cardboard or something a little bit more permanent. So, I think it's a really great way to get started with Automata.
Alright, so I have four really fun examples to share with you. I might have overdone it a little bit, but I got really excited about this. One of them is the talking box. I've got this talking box here, and the mouth can open and close. It kind of looks like a weird puppet to me. This is a really super easy one that we're going to look at first in a minute.
And I've also got a ladybug here that can fly, well she can't really fly, but her wings can open and close, oops. So that's this one. What I've done here is choose two different types of linkages to share with you. These two, the talking box and the ladybug, are of the same type, which are just basically beams that are held together. They've got, of course, pivot points right here, right? And then there's always a fixed point. Right now I'm holding the top with my fingers to make it the fixed point, and the rest of all the places where there's a joint are pivoting. So that's this kind of linkage that I made. What I've done with these is actually attach them by poking them through the box.
The other kind I made, the other two examples, I'm gonna move the ladybug, are a little bit more complex. What I've done, and let me do top down here so you can see, is actually make sort of a background plate using plates from the GO and the IQ kits and then attached my mechanism to that. This one is more of a crank and slider. So back to front here. You can see I'm turning, and there's a knob in the back, and I'll show you this more closely in a minute, but it's making the whale move. Still really easy to build but maybe slightly more complex.
And then the last one is just, I don't know if you can see this, but I was trying to make some monkeys jumping on the bed. Let me give you a top down here. If I turn it this way, you can see it a little bit better. There we go. Move out of the way, move this out of the way. You can see this is sort of my bed, and I made a pillow and some really great headboard stuff, but I tried, and then they can jump. With this lever here, there's a mechanism inside that allows them to jump up and down, and I'll show you that too.
And this one is also of the type that I've made some plates and anchored them to the mechanism to the box that way. I will hopefully be able to take this apart for you if we have time and show you how I did it. But if not, I will definitely make sure I post in the Community the details about it, 'cause this one is last and we might not quite get there, but we'll see.
All right, so I wanted to start with the talking box because I think it's the easiest one to do and there's so many possibilities with it. The mechanism that's in here is actually this. So let me top down again. This is the mechanism that's inside the talking box. It's just basically these five IQ pieces attached together, and that's all that's happening. You can see I've just put these cardboard lips over it, right? I've poked it through the box and they can open and close. Maybe it's better this way, right side up. There we go.
All right, so what I'm gonna do right now is just demonstrate to you how to make this, it's not hard at all. I have some semi-prepped pieces here for us, some glue dots. My idea here was to make this one actually look like a cat. So that's what I'm gonna try here. I've just got a regular old box, I cut the back out of it. You don't even have to cut quite this much, but I did for this so you can see it a little bit better. Then I just covered the front with a piece of blue paper so that it wasn't quite so ugly. That's all I've done so far.
What you need to do is think first about the kind of linkage that you're using, right? When you're doing this with kids, you can have them make some different linkages. You can go online and find different examples. There are hundreds of them, many good websites and also YouTube channels that show how to do this, how these different mechanisms are made in engineering contexts and things like that. You can have kids make a few of them and try them out and then play a little bit with how they move.
Before you're ever thinking about what you're gonna make, you need to look at the mechanism and think about what the movement is. What does it remind you of? To me, this immediately reminded me of a mouth, right? But maybe it reminds other people of something else. That's what this looked like to me. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna make this into something that talks. But if I start out with thinking like, oh, I'm gonna make something that talks, it's a little bit harder. I would encourage you to have kids make the mechanisms and then decide what they think they could actually turn into. That's what I did.
Another consideration is the size of the box that you have. You want to think about something that fits on the box, like this one's maybe a little bit big for this box. It would work, but I wanted to make a cat and it doesn't need to be this big. I was hoping to actually make its body on here too. I'm not gonna have time to do that right now, but I could do it, right? One of the things for kids is to help them think about the size of beams that they want to use in relation to make the right size mechanism for their box. It's a really great spatial reasoning thing to be thinking about and it might take them a few tries to figure out what the scale is 'cause it doesn't really come naturally and that's fine.
I would say also with all of these projects there's a lot of testing and trial and error. A lot of iterative problem solving. The iterations are really fast 'cause you're just taking this apart and putting it back together a bunch of times. But it took me a few times to figure out how I wanted to do things or the best ways to do things or what some really cool ways to use the VEX parts were. It's gonna take kids some time to do that too and that's great, that's totally fine.
I would let them explore through it, don't show them exactly how to do it. You know, give them a picture of the mechanism and say how would you use these VEX pieces to make the mechanism so that they are doing the problem solving and they're not just being told exactly how to put this together. So that's really the big learning part of it and the part of the maker mindset that you can get from doing this kind of project is having to work through that to solve your problem in a way that's kind of fun and challenging but also motivating. So we don't wanna give them too much information about how to do this. And I can talk more about that in the Community if anybody wants to discuss that.
Okay, so anyway, I decided I was gonna make a cat and I decided I was gonna make it a little bit smaller than this. So what I've got is some VEX GO pieces here, which I've already attached two of them together, but just to show you, all I'm doing is just taking a red pin and putting the two pieces together, super simple. It makes a little hinge, really easy. All right, so I did that and then I've got some other pieces here. So I've got some shafts and some shaft collars because what I did with this other one, which is the mouth, is that I poked holes through like a slit here through the box and a hole here. And then I just stuck the VEX GO shafts through my pieces and anchored them to the box with a shaft collar. It was really easy and it only took a minute.
So that's what we're gonna do right here. We need there to be a fixed pivot up here. And then this one is gonna be free. And the reason it's free, well not the reason it's free, but what's gonna make it free is having a slit here in the box. So you're gonna have to think about what size of shaft you wanna use. I'm not sure if this one's big enough, so I'm gonna give it a try here and see what happens. So I'm gonna stick it through here. I already poked a hole in my box before this session because I didn't wanna worry about stabbing myself honestly. Let me see if it is gonna work. Yeah, so there's enough space here on the other side to fit the shaft collar on.
But if you were curious about how I knew where to poke the hole and make the cut, what I did was I just got my pieces, I laid them here on the box and I played with a mechanism trying to figure out like how far down did I want it to go. I'm picturing this as a mouth, right? So how far down do I want the mouth to open and how far up do I want it to go? So I'm trying to picture like, oh you know, do I need to make it really close or do I wanna leave some room here to have the lips of my mouth so that there's something, so that they don't overlap 'cause that wouldn't look very good. So I'm just sort of thinking about that as I go.
And then once I sort of figure it out how far the movement, how much movement I want, I kind of looked at how far it was, looked like it was a little bit more than an inch. And then I just cut a slit in the box. A ruler can be a great tool, but you can also use VEX piece as a ruler or a straight edge. You can use the little bumps here to count centimeters if you want to, so you don't have to have a ruler.
All right, so I did that and then where is my other shaft? Okay, I'm gonna put this one through here and into the slit that I made, flip over my box and then I'm gonna put shaft colors on both of these shafts. And this one doesn't have to be tight down here because it's gonna move through here. But the other one which I just popped out does have to be tight because that's the fixed point and I don't want it to move. So I'm gonna press that chap color on there. And there you go.
All right, so now I have my little mechanism moving up and down and it could go a little further, but for now that's fine. And then I can do it from the back, right, so you can't really see what I'm doing.
Thank you for following along with this project. If you have any questions or want to share your own creations, feel free to reach out in the Community. Happy building!
And then after that, you're gonna go ahead and think about what the art parts of your mechanism are going to be. So I wanted to try to make a cat, and I am not the world's greatest drawer, so you're gonna have to bear with me here. But what I did was I tried to make a little kitty nose to put up here. I added a few little pipe cleaner whiskers and a little kitty mouth to put down here.
You've got a few choices. You can make a hole and kind of just stab it through here, which is what I'm gonna do. If you don't wanna do that, you don't have to. You could also add a glue dot and just stick it on there. You can do a little bit of experimenting and problem-solving to see what works for you. And you can also figure out where you want to position it. So if it's all the way closed, there's the top of my mouth, there's the bottom of my little mouth, and it looks like that. That's pretty good.
So actually, I'm just gonna hold this here, and I have a pencil back here somewhere, and I'm just gonna put a little dot right under there where the shaft was touching. And if I was smart, I would've brought a hole puncher in here, but I did not. So I am going to use this screwdriver, which works very well too. And I'm just gonna poke a little hole and stick it on there. There it is. I can also anchor it, but I need to anchor it really close to the pivot point, right? So if I wanted to put a little glue on here so it didn't swivel, I could. I'm not gonna take the time to do that now, but I gotta be careful where I anchor it. Like I don't wanna accidentally anchor the corner of this mouth up here, right? Because this has to move down. So you have to make sure that it can still move freely wherever you anchor your pieces.
All right, same thing for the top. So I'm gonna put a little pencil dot kind of right, I can see like where it is on the little mouse. I'm gonna poke a hole with my screwdriver and push that through there. Got some whiskers going crazy. I made a couple of eyes, which I'm gonna add with these blue dots, which are like a game changer if you can get them out of the box. Sorry, box. Okay, so one little blue dot here for my cat eye, I'll be right there. One little blue dot here. Just got the plastic part.
All right, now I have a kind of maniacal looking cat here that I have made. And of course, I could go do a lot more, right? Like I could make the cat's body, I could make a tail, I could put fur on it, like I could go crazy with a glue gun and some fake fur, some yarn. It would be really fun. But right now I just have this cat that can talk. So I can make this cat tell the story. I can make the cat do math problems, I can make the cat sing, like whatever I wanna do. And it was really easy and quick. And here's the back if you wanna see it, that's all there is.
So this is something that you know, your second and third graders can do with help. They can certainly draw all the pieces and parts, and it would be so much fun I think to do in the makerspace. So there we go. That is how to make a quick and easy talking box.
All right, I'm gonna set this cat aside and then I'm gonna get out my ladybug. Actually, I'm gonna try to clean up some of my area here just a little bit. All right, if this got this very large ladybug here and the mechanism for the ladybug is actually this one. So this right here where my fingers are would be the fixed point and the rest are pivot points.
When I was playing with this one and looking at it, the way that it moves to me looks like wings. So I was thinking about what I can make, and of course, a bird is an obvious choice, but I was like, well why not a beetle because everyone is gonna think of a bird I guess. But you could certainly make a really cool looking flying bird with it. So the ladybug is just that mechanism. Again, on the back, it's hard to see, but right here there's a shaft here that's got a shaft collar on it that's holding the top, the fixed point onto my box.
I cut a big long strip here because it was such a big mechanism that I needed a long distance for this to travel. And it's the same thing, another shaft, but this time I just put a little gear on it to hold it on. So then I slide it, that's all that's happening.
And then just so you can see, I'm actually gonna take off these super sparkly wings here so you can see what I did. These are just duct taped on. I can do something, you know, a little bit more fancy, but this works just fine. After all, I don't wanna put hot glue on my VEX pieces, so duct tape is a pretty, pretty good holder.
So I put it on there and take off the head, and you can see this isn't actually really anything, I just put this on here so I had something to attach the head to. But here's my mechanism and it's going like this. So you might wonder what this yellow thing is and why this is here is that because these two beams are not completely flat, the wings were like offset and it looked weird and it wasn't moving right.
I solved that problem by just adding a little height right here to the linkage, to the mechanism, by just adding another little VEX GO beam on here. And I've done this a few places in these different Automata, and it's worked really well to like even things out or to hold things off the back of the box if I need a little height or just another little piece, no one's gonna see it. And then I actually attached my wing to that piece when I attached it.
When I did attach the wings, I had the mechanism as closed, this is as closed as I have it here. And I held my wings and I sort of figured out how, where to put the tape so that they would be mostly centered, which I think I kind of just got them off-centered. But that's the idea. And the head is just a piece of card stock attached. Another really easy fun linkage that you can turn into all kinds of different things.
I'm sure also your kids are gonna think of ideas that you would never think of, ways to use the pieces that you've never thought of. All kinds of things that we don't think of, the kids think of. So you give them some ideas and plant some seeds and show them some different mechanisms and let them play with how to make some of these things. They're gonna have all kinds of ideas about what they can turn these into.
All right, the next example, gonna move the ladybug. So we're moving now into this other way of doing things that requires the creation of like a background plate. So we're gonna do the wave writing whale, here we go.
And so on the back, and by the way, this does not need to be this long, this shaft that I put through here, it's just the one that was at hand. If I were gonna make it again, I would use a smaller one. But for now, that's what it is. So to make the mechanism work, I'm turning the orange VEX GO knob. But if I look inside here, I can see what's happening.
So this is that crank and slider mechanism. Oops, here we go. This is, hold it up a little bit. What's happening here is this linkage is converting rotational input right here with this crank into linear movement. So you see the linear movement there of the black beam, and that allows for a limited range of motion for our little whale who's riding the waves here.
All right, so I am going to demo this one too. So we'll put him aside. And I've got a bunch of pieces here. I'm not gonna actually make the whale, I'm just gonna show you how I made this linkage. Let's see what makes sense here. Well, we'll leave it like this for now.
So the first thing I'm gonna show you is how I made like the background sort of piece anchor piece out of GO pieces. And you know, of course, you can do the exact same thing with IQ pieces. The reason that I did this is that you can make some of these and then anchor different mechanisms onto them and then again change them out and experiment with them pretty easily.
Thank you for watching and I hope you found this demonstration helpful. Feel free to reach out with any questions or ideas. Happy building!
If you look online, you will see that some people do this kind of thing with peg boards. So it's just kind of a simulated pegboard more or less. For this, all I did was layout the pieces and the size that I wanted, again, taking into consideration the size of my box, right? I knew I had a box that was yay big, and I had to make something that fit inside there. I looked through my GO pieces and found these plates that seemed to be the right size.
Now, all I'm gonna do is just real quick put them together with some pins and some other GO pieces so that they're like one cohesive part. I like to do this because I can get all three of these corners anchored at the same time. Then I'm gonna put another one of these down here. I don't want them to move, but if they're not completely solid, it's not gonna be the end of the world. Put this guy on there. How are they doing? I mean, that's pretty solid right there with just those two little red plates. If I wanted to, I could put some more things here and here, but I really think it's gonna be fine. So there we go.
I also did that for the monkeys jumping on the bed example that I'm gonna show you. I just made a slightly bigger one because the box was slightly bigger. All right, so once I had this, what I need then is to actually take this out of here because I can always put it back, but if I take it out, you'll be able to see it a little bit better. Sorry, Mr. Whale. Or maybe you know what I'll do is I'll just take off the artsy bits. It's coming out. It's coming out. Try not to break it too much. Okay, so here we go. So you can really get an idea of this mechanism. I'm gonna put this back through here. Oops, the wrong way just so you can see.
Now I played around a lot with exactly where I was gonna put my gear, where I was gonna put these pins that keep this beam in place. It'll make a difference, right? So right there doesn't work, there's not enough room for it to move. So I had to keep playing around a little bit, figuring out where is the right hole to put this through. So you will have to do that too. Your students will have to do it. Ah, sorry. Okay, but let's just make one. So here we go. Here's basically what it looks like. All it is for these pieces put together with pins. And again, there's different possibilities for movement depending on what size pieces you use and how you put them together. But very simply just put together like this. Can you see that? There we go.
Now you have to anchor, you gotta have your fixed point, right? So I'm gonna put a fixed point right here and just anchor my orange beam on there. Then I have to figure out the movement part, right? So this is gonna go around and around like this, and this is what the whale would be attached to and what would allow the whale to have this fun little up and down movement like it's riding the waves. I can just experiment here and look a little bit about how is this the end of this long black beam moving and how can that help me figure out where, there we go, to attach it on this background. So let's just first of all anchor it.
I'm taking the red pin and I'm putting it, I'm actually, I have this flipped over. So with these go gears, there's like a recessed side and a flatter side, but I used the flatter side because I needed it to spin smoothly and I didn't think that was gonna work over here because the pin would not be sticking out quite far enough. So again, that was something I played around with. I was like, oh, does this work? Well nope, let's flip it over and try. And that's the kind of problem solving your kids can do too. All right, so I'm sticking that in there, putting that here or, and see it can rotate. The little beam is rotating around because it's not stuck in the middle, it's stuck on one of the side holes. And now my job is to figure out where I want it to go in this plate. So let's just try it in different places.
So this is like not the right piece, that's part of my problem. Okay, here we go. So I am going to stick it through this hole and see what happens if I crank it. That's not working 'cause this is in the way. Come through the back. So this is kind of a trial and error part of things. Oops. There we go. So that doesn't give a whole lot of movement, right? It's a little bit, I mean, it's moving but it's not quite what I would want. So I'm gonna try moving it over a little bit, moving it down.
This part of things is just playing around and figuring out what works, what is working for you. Is it the right movement that you want or is it not? So I spent a while playing around with this and that looks pretty good to me. Now also you can use these connectors as sort of pins that keep this black beam in place. So I'm just gonna put that one there and then I'm gonna test it again, look at how it's moving. Think about where I want my other connector. So I can't put it right here 'cause of these red pins, but I could put it up here and it will kind of keep that in place.
All right, so now, there we go. I'm having trouble with this now. Trying to hold it and show you and it's harder than you might think. All right, there we go. So let me spin it and yeah, that looks pretty good. So I could attach a whale to this part if I wanted to or something else. A giant sea monster coming out of the water or a dragon. I mean anything that your kids can think of, they can attach to it. And then I just put this whole thing through the box and added this crank or the orange knob, not crank but it's working like a crank, the orange knob to the back here to twist it. And that is how I made that mechanism.
And then with the box you can see, I mean this is not like the most beautiful cutting job, but I just cut out a big enough hole there for that mechanism to rotate through freely. So you have to make sure that like these little cardboard bits aren't getting in the way 'cause that's annoying and you have to make sure that it goes long enough so that the motion can happen. But that's basically it. And then the only other hole that I poked was the hole for the shaft to go through. And I did it the same way. I like sort of stuck it in there, lined it up, thought about where I wanted it to go, drew a pencil dot and just stabbed it with a screwdriver.
And then I simply taped, like this is just a piece of packaging tape and it has stayed up until today and I made this like three days ago. So I basically just taped, I'm just gonna tape this up real quick, tape this in here where I wanted it. And you could use duct tape or whatever else. I'll show you a couple other cool tricks for anchoring things into cardboard that I came up with. So you can anchor stuff to cardboard. I showed you this earlier with a shaft and a shaft collar, right? That's really easy. You can also use pieces that have like a connector that have two little pins sticking out the back and then take a beam or any other VEX GO or VEX IQ piece really and just press it on there. And now this is anchored through there and you know, just by making this little example to show you I got a bunch of other ideas, right? Like this is a really easy way to make something that spins.
So if you were doing this project with really young children, like a first or second grader, you could help them make these and then have them come up with little, you know, some kind of scenario that would spin that they could add to this, they could make it into a fan, they could make it into like a little merry-go-round. They could put more than one piece on here. There's a bunch of things you could do.
And then these pieces here, maybe if you guys like this idea, I might actually turn this into something for our next session. I realize it would be really fun to create a marble run by anchoring GO and IQ pieces in this manner through some cardboard and, you know, putting the beams. Anyway, you can picture it. There are just a whole bunch of fun ideas that will even arise in your own mind when you play with stuff like this. So if anybody likes that idea about the marble run, let me know, and I'll make one up and share it with you next time.
Alright, so I showed you this mechanism, and I did promise that I would take apart the monkeys on the bed or give you a look into the monkeys on the bed, jumping on the bed. Let me clean up some of these bits, and we will go on from there. I'll fix the whale later. He's so cute. Okay, this out of the way and this out of the way. Last example.
Alright, so it looks like this monkey, let me turn it on the front view again. This one has a lever sticking out the side, one of your simple machines, right? That helps the monkeys jump up and down. This is what you use to work it, and then here is what it looks like on the inside. So that's the back of it. By the way, I made the whale mechanism. You can see, right? I made the whale mechanism facing the audience because I thought it's kind of cool that way, but this is what I made with the mechanism hidden. So you could do it either way, so I'm just gonna kind of take off the bedspread here.
You can see that this is really, it's kind of harder to see with IQ pieces because they're darker in color, but this is very similar. There isn't really a gear in it, so it's not really, I don't think it's a crank and slider, but you can see what's happening is this lever is transferring movement into these other two beams, and the two beams are anchored here with this pin. So that's all it is. I actually attached two beams together here to make it long enough to go through my box. That was just basically a choice based on my box size.
Again, if you were doing this with kids and you wanted to kind of simplify things, especially for younger kids, you might just choose a whole bunch of the exact same size boxes so that you can sort of help them know how big of a background plate to make. That's probably what I would do. Yeah, that's definitely what I would do. But, so yeah, you can see it here. My pins are these guys, they're not the connectors. The pieces are a little bit different with VEX GO and VEX IQ. So depending on what you're using, you're gonna use different pieces, but they can all do the same things. So basically that's all that's happening there.
I'm actually gonna see if I can take the whole thing out, take off my monkeys, take off my fabric here. This one is also duct-taped through here or onto the box. So hopefully I can do this without wrecking it really carefully. Yeah. Oh, there we go. Alright, so you can see the skeleton here. Here's just my box with my holes poked through. These were my anchor points. This was something that was holding on one of the shafts on the back. And then here's my little mechanism. I had earlier a piece right here that was blocking this so that it didn't go too far. See, there's a lot of motion that can happen here, but I was limited by the top of my box, and I didn't want this coming down all the way to here. So I ended up using the bottom of the box to brace it. But you could stick a piece in there too to block it so you can see how that works.
So again, what I did was just make this mechanism, look at it, and what did it remind me of? For some reason, it reminded me of monkeys jumping on a bed. So that's what I made.
Encouraging kids to start with a mechanism, build it, and then decide what it reminds them of is a great way to foster creativity. They can figure out how to make things that are the right proportion, make holes in the box, and find a way to anchor it. This is essentially the process. Some of these projects, especially the more involved ones, are suitable for older children. Middle school kids could definitely do it and have a great time. They might still need some help, but that's fine. They can come up with a vision of what they want to do, and you can help them work through the problem-solving needed to achieve it.
Whenever I did a lot of maker space activities with my students, I often had kids with a variety of questions. If they all wanted help at the same time, I would put up a sign-up board for help at the front of the room. I asked them to sign their name and briefly write what they needed help with, so I could call them in order, like a first-come, first-serve system. If I saw that two kids needed help with something similar, I could have them come over and watch me help the other person, so they could see that they were doing similar things and we could work it out together. This saved me a ton of time, and the kids liked it too. This would be one way to facilitate doing this, especially with older kids in your makerspace, if they were working on more complex mechanisms.
All right, let's see. So we did our demos, tips, and tricks. There we go. We talked about the box size. If you're doing it in a maker space, you might want to have different sizes of boxes depending on what size pieces you're using or whether you're using Go or IQ. I used heavy boxes for these, like shoe boxes and random cardboard boxes, but if you use a cereal box, it's easier for younger kids to poke through. That's another really easy possibility. Setting up a hot glue station or helping kids with hot glue can help these things stay together for quite a bit longer.
All right, last thing, and then I'm going to take some questions. Ideas for extending this project include doing these Automata as a great mixed-age project. You could have the older kids make the mechanisms and the younger kids make the decorative or moving parts, like little monkeys or beds. It's a great group project where different people can do different things. If you have students that really need a challenge, they could add motors, sensors, and code these to make them fully functional robots. You could also connect this to books. Anything you're studying could be made into a diorama. These could be used in a study of simple machines, as there are a lot of levers involved. Kids could try several different types of mechanisms, add pulleys, or use 1, 2, 3 and Go in your school to code the 123 robot to spin and act as the crank, then attach GO pieces to the art ring.
I played around a little with that, but I don't really have time to show you. If you like that idea, I can incorporate it into a future maker session as well. That would be a fun multi-age situation, where older kids make the moving parts and younger kids do the 1, 2, 3 parts. I think that would be really cool. You could also use the art ring canvas on 1, 2, 3 to make something that spins around, like a merry-go-round, carousel, or fan.
And also, there's a bunch of math connections that you could do. You could have kids measuring angles in these Automata. You could have them comparing the sizes of pieces and measuring. There's just a ton of things that you could do if you wanted to.
Alright, so we have made it to 7:17. I crammed a ton of stuff into that amount of time. If you have any questions, suggestions, or ideas, now is the time for that. Please let me know, and no worries if not, I can always let you guys go a few minutes early.
All right, so do not forget to share in the PD+ Community thread for this session what you liked about this session, ideas for future sessions, any questions that you have, or materials that you want me to share. Just let me know. I am happy to do so.
I really enjoyed putting this session together and I hope you enjoyed attending it. I will see you back here in our next Makerspaces for Creative Learning Live Session.
Thanks so much for coming.
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