Today was a very relaxing day, where I tried not to involve myself in any work related stuff at all.

So I asked the kids what they wanted to do this morning. They said, build a robot.

So we did. Unfortunately, they (the kids) are probably still a little to small to get into Lego Mindstorms or programming and wiring my Raspberry Pi to run some servos, so we went for the next best thing. Cardboard.

I made some nets (a net here being a 2d diagram for a 3d shape) for the different parts of a robot, we printed them out onto some card, cut them out and stuck them together. The kids decorated the robots with some great creative flair.

It was a great fun day that I would recommend to anyone who finds the weather not suitable for playing outside and want to do something a little different.

Just in case there is anyone else out there in a similar situation I have attached (linked below) the print-outs that we used to build the robot. Cut the solid lines and fold (in most cases) the dotted lines. I printed these onto construction paper and it worked really well. Scoring the to be folded lines using a ball point pen and a ruler is highly recommended to ease making the folds in the right places. A decent quick drying glue is a good idea too – glue sticks just don’t work for this stuff.

card robot legs net card robot head net card robot body net card robot arms net

They look like:

I’ve licensed the the plans/net/images (however you want to refer to them!) under the a very unrestrictive creative commons license so you use them and play around with the safe in knowledge that I’m cool with that.

These works by Chris Paine are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Although the linked PDF versions are higher quality 🙂 They are designed for printing out onto A4 paper. Although you could/can fit two of the head nets onto one piece of A4 if you fiddle with it.

I hope someone, somewhere, sometime reads this and finds it of use. I know I tried searching the Internet for “robot card net”, “paper robot diagram”, “build your own paper robot” and other such in the hope that someone else had already done the hard work. Perhaps with the magic of Google someone else will search and find this… (if you do, please send me a note, I’d be most happy to find out! 🙂 )

Cheers!