Robot Building – Part 2

I survived our robot building workshop this afternoon! It was a lot of controlled chaos, but I think the kids and many of the parents had a really great time building, exploring, imagining, and just having a really great time together. We ended up with over 100 people for this event, which was absolutely insane, but surprisingly everyone was able to gather enough supplies, I heard/saw no tears and zero arguments over materials, which is absolutely amazing for this large number of participants.
The kids did a great job with their robots, some big, some small, all very imaginative and creative. I would give you all a few tips about offering a program like this. Definitely do this on a linoleum or easy clean-up floor… We only had a room with a carpet and let me tell you, I spent almost 45 minutes cleaning up paint that spilled on the floor. We separated our materials by art supplies and technology pieces making it easy to find what the kids needed. And you’ll definitely need some hot glue guns – it’s the best way to stick different robot parts together. In order to let everyone get a chance to pick some supplies we had all the kids find a space at the tables and then sent each table up to find supplies. We thought about restricting how many pieces they could pick up, but it was just to difficult to count everyone’s supplies, but as I said we had plenty of parts and everyone got something they wanted.