Becky Perkins

The second quarter attempts at Genius Hour, were much more successful. So much so, that I am breaking down the projects into individual posts.

The Bot



A group of my kids said, "Ms. Perkins, we want to make a robot." That's how it starts. They decide what interests them, and then they have to figure out how to do it.  In this case, the original idea was to make a beetle bot. It is something much bigger than what we ended up making.  Due to the lack of resources available, we ended up missing a few key components to make the beetle bot come together. We did however stumble across a video of these little bristle bots.  (They remind me a lot of those little hex bugs.)




So what did they learn from this? Well they learned a lot about circuits. They also learned about motors and switches.  There were several structural problems with the original design, and they had to brainstorm solutions to solve those problems.