[Will] from Revolt Lab needed a project to get the summer campers he supervises interested in electronics, but when your audience is 5 years old, your subject matter had better be simple, yet interesting enough to hold their attention at length. He settled on using a Lego NXT robot to keep their little minds engaged, because who doesn’t like robots?
He picked up a basic Lego NXT kit and paged through the manual. The first “example” robot looked pretty cool so he decided to give it a shot, though he still hadn’t figured out exactly what he would have the robot do. Inspiration struck, and he decided that he could take advantage of the NXT’s color sensor as well as its proximity sensor to construct a balloon hunting robot.
He constructed a “balloon corral” to keep the balloons in place and the kids out of his thumbtack-wielding robot’s reach. He let his creation loose, and as you can see in the video below, the robot hunts down the blue balloon and pops it, much to the children’s delight.
If you’re in the position to introduce a group of young kids to electronics, this balloon popping robot paired with some conductive Play Dough would make for a fun and educational afternoon workshop.