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Robot Books for Kids!

Wow, so many things to share!  Five months ago our son was born, and now our research is showing up in kids books everywhere! I’m really excited about this, and the opportunity to inspire future generations of robotics engineers and researchers!

I’m especially pleased by the newest book published by Scholastic: “Really? Robots” — I contributed a section on our robots, helped edit the overall book, and wrote the forward. It is a fun and inspirational book with an overview of many different types of robots and how they function. Besides the joy of inspiring future generations of robot builders, I’m also honored by the credit they have given me:

ReallyRobots_cropped

And before I even had my own copy of the book I got a request for an autograph from my first fan!  I ended up inviting Lilly to visit our lab so that she could see the robots in person.  It was delightful to see how excited she was from the experience, and I hope it inspires her to think more about robots and intelligence.

And this week, KQED published a blog post about our research and our collaboration with UC Berkeley.

It was a great article, and is geared at inspiring elementary school kids. They are working on an e-book for science teachers to include in classroom education, and so I’m excited to see that coming out soon.

Along with the blog post, they made this really excellent video:


And finally, if all this inspirational content is enough to excite a young engineer into action, another book was recently published on Making Simple Robots! This is a great book with simple instructions and includes a project for making a tensegrity robot!

So, all together, it is really joyful to be finding ways to share the inspiration of our robotics research with students from all age groups — from post-docs to pre-school! Enjoy, and please share these resources with the young engineers and curious learners in your life!


Update: There is another kids book that I helped with that has been published, this one on Space Exploration and the Solar System.  In this case my role was a fact checker for the primary author, Susan Hayes, verifying that the facts she included were correct.  It is a really fun book called “Space Adventure” and is a bit of an activity book too, with tear out pages to make things, stickers, etc.

Posted in Robots, Tensegrity.

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