For a couple of years I've had the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot kit on my wish list. With gifts received for my recent birthday, I had enough funds to finally buy the thing.
I wanted it for my own tinkering projects. But lately I've also wanted it as an aspect of raising "geeklets". I'm going to do everything I can to expose my two girls to science, technology, math and engineering-related material. I don't want them to grow up with our society's stereotype that girls "aren't good at that."
They will make up their own minds whether those are fields they want to explore further, but my job is to make the opportunity available to them. I got this tinkering proclivity from my own engineer father, who loves to take things apart to see if he can fix them himself and who approaches every project with an "I can figure that out" attitude.
Another reason is that Audrey has repeatedly expressed a fear of robots. We're not sure where it came from. I've explained to her that robots are just machines that can only do what we tell them to do. Now I can demonstrate that to her.
I figured an appropriate first project was to make a robot that was afraid of Audrey! Thus the first project is named Scared Bot. It cruises around happily, until it "sees" something less than 10 inches in front of itself (via its ultrasonic sensor). When that happens, it jumps back in surprise. Here's a little movie.
As you can see, it was a big hit with Audrey.
I plan to post videos of all the robots we make together in the future.
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