Allow me to introduce you to my giant robot, who was greeting visitors at the entrance to the Museum. In fact, it doesn’t have a name yet! Until March 31, 2013 you can name the robot for a chance to win a copy of my first e-book.

I really enjoyed making this giant robot and the Museum had to protect it with a fence because the children wanted to see it up close!

In the coming months, I definitely plan to share the secret of how I made this robot.

I worked with more than 800 children during a series of workshops at the Science and Technology Museum. My biggest challenge was to find projects suitable for various age groups. Visitors to the workshops ranged from 2 years to 20 years old!

For the younger ones, I had the idea of creating a little robot puppet with a paper bag. My model was rather simple but the kids had very creative ideas to personalize their puppet.

For older children and young adults I created basic geometric shapes that could be used to make all kinds of original robots.

There was also an intermediate robot based on a cardboard tube. It always gave surprising results!

In addition to the basic supplies, each participant could also delve into baskets filled with construction paper scraps, buttons, corks, bread bag closures and other recycled materials that allowed everyone to be creative and make something unique.

This series of workshops enabled the children to learn different techniques and to create with materials that were sometimes unusual. Buttons became robot noses or control panels, corks became wheels or legs, tubes became reactors, etc.

What I liked about this project is that, even though each person started with a well-defined set of supplies to create their robot, creativity often took over. I noticed that the examples that I had displayed were not limiting the imagination of the children, but were instead inspiring them to go beyond what they saw, and have them the freedom to be really creative.

Here is a small selection of the robots that I found most original: