Junkyard robots

In one of the rooms in MakerFaire last year, volunteers handed out goggles, glue guns and hammers to the kids and set them loose in a warehouse piled up with dismantled computers, cables and broken keyboards. Ah, the twin tendencies of destruction and creation, which would my son choose ?

Well, if you know my son you’ll know that I had to forcibly pry each white-knuckled finger off the hammer when it was time to go. He’ll never miss an opportunity to bust stuff up, and this time he was encouraged by adults. The last thing he said before he fell asleep that night was, “that was the bestest day of my life.” I did see plenty of creation going on at MakerFaire though, which made me lament that we didn’t have our own piles of crap lying around.

Happily, we do have lots of piles of crap lying around this week because we’re nearing the end of a kitchen remodel. I labeled a big plastic box “robot parts” and my son spent a day rescuing interesting things from the construction debris. A few days later I helped him glue his robots together with a hot glue gun.

These are not the sturdiest of robots and they don’t do anything except tilt over, but the point was spending time together, and giving our trash a few last whirls as toys. And he’s got plans: the robots still need arms, a microphone for a mouth maybe, and some sort of legs. As I try to do more often, we’re keeping on eye on the trash.