Build LEGO®-compatible Gyroscope - Robotic Project for Kids

Learn physics through play! The gyroscopic effect is one of the most exciting concepts of physics which is demonstrated in this project.

For this project, you are going to need a Cherry Tart kit.

When it comes to kids' education, physics always plays an absolutely crucial role. Simple physics experiments leverage kids' understanding of their surrounding world and help them understand the concepts of engineering in the future. One way of learning physics for kids is through robotics. Learning robotics is a fun and engaging approach that can build kids’ confidence and leverage their curiosity, creativity, and team working ability through hands-on activities. In this tutorial blog, we will use lego-compatible building blocks in the Cherry Tart set to build a setup that enables us to explore the gyroscopic effect.

To simply put, gyroscopic motion is the tendency of a rotating object to maintain the orientation of its rotation. In other words, when you spin an object with a certain mass (let’s say a wheel in this case) fast enough, it resists twitching. You probably have experienced a gyroscopic effect when playing with a spinner. Here we have the same spinner but we’re going to spin it using a dc motor. This allows our spinner to spin indefinitely without falling.

To spin the spinner fast enough, you should make a spinning chassis so that you can carefully place the spinner on top of it. The friction between the spinning chassis and the spinner causes the spinner to start rotating. When the spinner reaches a minimum rotational speed, you can carefully let go of it and see it stays upright. You can even lift and twitch the chassis by hand and see the spinner hold position.

To make our chassis, we will use a pair of gears with different diameters to transfer power from the motor to the spinning chassis. Gear pairs divide into two categories. Those that are driving and those that are driven. In this example, the gear mounted on the motor’s shaft is the driving gear, and the one coupled to the spinning chassis is the driven gear. If the driving gear has a relatively larger diameter than the driven one, it rotates the driven gear multiple times with a single rotation. This causes an increase in rotation speed while transmitting motors' power over the gears.

The following instruction provides step-by-step how-to assembly instructions to build this project.