Welcome to Robot Dance Club. Let's dance together! Follow these four simple dance moves: 1/Cut a foot and half long and three fingers wide strip from a cardboard box. 2/Roll it into a ring and secure it with a duck tape. Or you can cut a three fingers wide ring from a cardboard tube. Look for a suitable tube at shipping stores or stores where rolled materials such as carpets, fabrics or plastic sheets are sold. I am confident you can find a tube long enough for all to share, and for free. 3/Attach three markers, evenly spaced, to the outside of the cardboard ring. 4/Drop a weasel ball inside the ring. Voilà! Your dancing robot is born.
Watch the robot dance, gliding over the dance floor and leaving behind colorful witness lines of its dance moves. It moves all on its own. Does it have its own brain? Does it have muscles? Does it need to eat?
When I make dance robots with children in afterschool programs we look for answers to many questions our robots inspire.
We also explore different proportions of the cardboard 'body'. And we also play with attaching pens, pencils, markers and even paintbrushes to the 'body'. We wonder why some glide faster than the others.
We enjoy watching all our robots draw and dance together. The art they create feeds our imagination. Some children see tree roots, others fairies. I see coral reefs.