This weekend we made a "robot" out of the various things in the recycle bin, a roll of duct tape, an Arduino board, and a bunch of random electronic components. The idea was to find the "sweet spot" project for one 4 year old and one 7 year old to do together. And the need was the fact that they wanted something to make their room a bit brighter in the night.

The trickiest bit was actually getting all of the body parts to stay together while the robot stands. The actual electronics and programming were incredibly approachable thanks to the Arduino community and the Google school of electronic circuits.

The trick is: build it in 1.5 hour stages as I've noticed attention spans don't last longer than that. On day 1 we proved the concept by just having the eyes constantly "on," and on day 2 we added the light sensing circuit.