Robot Project for my 11 year old son?

Let's Make Robots Beginners
1

All,

I know NOTHING about robots, but my 11 year old son has expressed an interest and his birthday is coming up and I thought a robot project might be something that he would really enjoy and learn a lot from! It would be a fun way for both of us to learn about robots together!

I was looking at the tracked kits available for sale on this site. Like this one:

robotshop.com/en/dfrobotshop-rover-v2-arduino-compatible-tracked-robot-autonomous-development-kit.html

I was thinking something that we could do together and something that could be modified and/or expanded over time.

Is this a good starter project? What else would we need? A controller of some sort?

Feel free to direct me to online reading…no need to reinvent the wheel!

Thank you!
Chris

2

Hey Chris,

As someone who is current on a work-term (I’m an University student), I have a lot of co-workers with kids around that age who are interested in robotics.

I think the DFRobot rover is your ideal candidate because it there is a lot of support on the forums and you do not need anything extra to get it up and running. Of course, you may consider adding stuff to it once you are done. For someone his age, I highly recommend you pick up a breadboard and mount it over the prototyping area on the PCB. The reason for this, in order to use the prototyping area soldering is required whereas a breadboard would allow your son to mount sensors on the breadboard and connect it to the controller.

An alternate option that is more expensive and less appealing is
robotshop.com/ca/en/parallax … rsion.html

3

The DFRobotShop Rover Autonomous Kit is actually not the best platform for an 11 year old to get started with since it is really up to the user to make connections and develop the code.

Some other ideas for that age range include:
robotshop.com/en/lego-mindst … =RB-Leg-06 (perfect all-around for that age - if budget permits)
robotshop.com/en/vex-iq-star … RB-Inn-332 (excellent construction kit)
robotshop.com/en/owi-535-rob … =RB-Owi-41 (13+, but a good project for you and him)
robotshop.com/en/elenco-beet … RB-Ibo-214 (12+)
robotshop.com/en/finch-progr … =RB-Bir-01 (programming oriented)

Additional ideas for high school students here:
robotshop.com/en/robots-high-schools.html

4

Hello Chris,

the staff here are the experts. Now that I think about it, Coleman is quite right, I think I was biased because I have been wanting to get a DFrover kit myself haha.

Out of the ones Coleman listed I want to say the Lego platform is amazing. In our first year of University, our first open ended design project was to make a robot using the lego kit. Every student had to do it.

It is very much plug and play and uses Robot C which is based off the programming language C but with a lot of built in functions to interface with the NXT sensors. It does require your son to learn how to do basic C programming but there are great resources. In fact if you would like to pick up the NXT, I would be glad to help.

My first year project with the lego NXT was a maze solving robot that could solve any maze and redraw the shortest path with a marker.