SparkBots! Arduino for Kids

For a long time I had been looking to develop a toolkit to provide workshops on robotics. With previous workshops I have run they have been targeted to a much younger audience, making very simple projects that teach basic robotics principles. When researching how to teach pupils Arduino and robotics, I really struggled to find information, especially designed for a school setting, so I've tried to make this Instructable as comprehensive as possible.

I actually don't think it would have been possible to design and run this activity without Tinkercad - no other free application integrates the mechanical, electrical and software components so smoothly. It is a great way to avoid having to pass a circuit around the glass - you can just pop it on the board and click 'run simulation'! Students continually looked at the schematics to follow, and actually got annoyed if they were taken off the board as they wanted to get on with building (see the picture above of them intently looking at Tinkercad on the projector)!

SparkBots is a day long workshop, where children (suitable for ages 12 and up) learn the basics of robotics and build their own small robot. When you wave at the SparkBot, it waves back! It uses a simple input (ultrasonic sensor), processor (the Arduino) and output (movement of the servo controlling the hands). Students can then decorate it however they want.

The activity is designed to be very portable, requiring no equipment (other than chairs, tables etc!) from the school. It uses cardboard to enable students to make easy changes to the design of their robot, unlike other activities that rely on 3D printed, laser cut or pre-packaged robot kits.

For the electronics supplies I would really recommend ordering quite far in advance, especially if you are getting stuff shipped through AliExpress. My order came pretty fast (for the Arduinos) - it took about 6 weeks. Also in general you will save a lot of money if you buy in bulk, partly for tax reasons. For the rest of the stuff I ordered from Amazon - with the cheapest items you might have some that don't work (especially the servos) but Amazon are generally pretty good at doing refunds.

For one kit:

• Mini breadboard
• LEDs (lots - they get blown very easily by enthusiastic students!)
• Switches
• Resistors
• 9V battery snap
• Arduino cable
• Arduino Uno (for a kit containing this and all above see here)
• 9V battery (+spares)
• Ultrasonic Sensor (HC-SR04)
• Micro Servos (x2, SG90)
• Cardboard box (I used 120x110x80mm but any size that is bigger than an Arduino would work)
• Jumper wires - male to male (lots) and female to male (4)
• Storage container

For general use:

• Glue Guns (tape could work as well)
• Scissors (safety ones work fine)
• Coloured Card
• Stickers, tape, pens etc.

I tested out the idea with some other groups of young people, and overall the response to a robot that waves back to you was really strong. The most common response was a desire to have a lot more decoration and personalisation for the robot (one very young person actually got a pen out and drew all over the cardboard box to give it a nose and mouth!), so this was something I made sure to provide for when running the actual workshop.

I made my friend build a prototype so I could practise the instructions, and also have one to demonstrate with. One interesting thing to note was there was a lot of design fixation among the students, so in future I would actually make a less detailed demo robot so that their creativity could shine through (although to be fair lots of pupils were very very creative anyway!).

I designed the circuit for the SparkBots, and all of the introductory circuits, using Tinkercad. As someone who isn't amazing at programming, it was a great way to make sure all of my code actually worked properly, and it was also very easy to understand for the students. The circuit diagrams are really clear and you can run simulations to demonstrate how the circuit works.

Because I ordered a lot of the components from AliExpress, I needed to test that all the Arduinos worked properly, and that I didn't need to install additional drivers to run them. Luckily they were all OK for me, although other reviews suggested they didn't work properly. The only downside is that the Arduino interface throws up some quite weird errors with these boards that don't seem to happen with other ones I've used.

I assembled each set of components and placed them in a container (I got some tupperware boxes from Poundland which were the perfect size).

This was a step that I really overlooked, but turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of it all! In hindsight some sort of wheely box would have been useful but I didn't have one available so it was mostly transported on my bike from the building where the equipment (glue guns, cutting boards, scissors etc) was stored.

On the day we had three volunteers and travelled by train, and obviously we had to get out the prototype SparkBot to enjoy the view!

When we arrived at the school we set everything up and got connected to the WiFi and the projector - we forgot about the aux cable which later caused some issues but other than that it was smooth sailing.

We preloaded the code to the boards (although if you are using completely fresh Arduinos they often come with the blink LED circuit already uploaded). The Blink LED circuit is considered the 'Hello World' of Arduino, and Tinkercad has a standard circuit and code available to select.

The students seemed to really enjoy jumping straight in to getting a circuit to work, simply plugging the LED straight into the Arduino. We then moved to using a breadboard, making sure to pass round a breadboard with the back peeled so they could properly understand how it worked. Some of the students really grasped this quickly and we got them working on how to introduce a switch in, while others needed a bit more time to play around with the original circuit.

Quite a few of the LEDs got blown! It was a useful demonstration of some of the basic principles of electronics (power, voltage, current etc) that we had tried to explain, and the smell of burning plastic was a powerful reminder of what they had learned. Also explanations of polarity of LEDs got a lot of nods of understanding after they had struggled with putting them in the wrong way round and nothing working.

This was the activity that probably went the most smoothly! In their break time I went around and uploaded more code to the boards. The only issues that students had with this one was getting their power and ground the wrong way round, which was a theme that continued throughout the day (after debugging a lot of circuits you learn to check they've got this right first!).

We also had to remind them to unplug their batteries as the micro servos draw quite a lot of current so drain them fast (and had lots of spares on hand for when they inevitably forgot).

The students seemed confused about the concept of male to male vs female to male wires (and there were quite a few sniggers, understandably - they are 13 year olds). But other than that this circuit also went pretty well, and it was their first one using multiple components working together.

We also gave a brief overview of the principles of sound waves, including watching an interesting video about how some blind people employ echolocation to try and work out where they are going.

We introduced the SparkBots activity before lunch, and they all got to work designing their robots. They had laptops so that they could research and find inspiration, and had pens and paper to sketch out their ideas.

They struggled quite a lot with building the circuit and I had to go around and do a lot of debugging, which in a lot of cases was a bit difficult due to their interesting circuit design. If you want to make it more clear then you should definitely go very slowly and use the references on the breadboard (letter and number) to describe exactly where they should place the wires. The batteries started dying at this point in the day so it was definitely good to have more on hand.

At this stage some students came up with quite elaborate ideas, and if I did it again I would gently discourage them from the more extreme ends of this as they just don't have the time. However it was an interesting exercise for a lot of them as they attempted coding the robots, and found it quite a bit more difficult than they were expecting - probably because our main focus of the day was hardware.

If you were doing this activity as part of a weekly club you would definitely want to spend a bit more time teaching them about coding. The Tinkercad interface works really well, especially if you have students who are just outgrowing languages like Scratch but don't yet have the confidence to write fully in C++ themselves. You can write code in the block based language in Tinkercad and then see how it translates to C++ - we encouraged students to point out differences they noticed between them and they picked up on lots of things that I didn't even notice!

There were so many awesome ideas, and all but 2 groups managed to make a finished robot. We had a cowboy, the Duolingo owl, and even a small car which was very impressive given the equipment that they were given. One particularly impressive group wrote their own code to integrate an LED into the process, which they had light up when the sensor detected movement - they showed a really good understanding of the principles they had learned.

We got some really great feedback on the questionnaires we provided - in general students really enjoyed the day but would have liked a bit more time for the final activity. Overall it was a really great group of kids who engaged well, and we will definitely be running this workshop in the future for other students.