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education

Design for living among living things

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house in Mons

(c) Guy Pommares

To show highschool kids that robotics can be fun we built an EggBot.

It is made to print geometrical patterns on the surface of a sphere.

A spindle turns the sphere while an arm moves a pen back and forth.

We took it to an outreach day for the Sooke first nation youngsters.

Patterns were generated on an OLPC computer and shown on a wide LCD.

With Logo Turtlegraphics we had the youngsters create some patterns.

With minimal instructions and nested loops we got complex drawings.

It certainly engaged the attention of even the younger students.

We set up some basic routines for them to modify and explore.

The idea was to achieve a certain complexity with very few lines.

They enjoyed it and felt they could handle that sort of challenge.

Repeating hexagons can be made to wander all over the round surface.

When shifted accurately they appear to be drawing stacked cubes.

The whole experiment is easily packed away in a pretty small box.

The Spherical Drafting Robot