Recap by Miko Sellier, Grade 9

 

The Robot Making workshop took place in the teen library room on the fourth floor. I happily helped with setting up the crafting tables and signing everyone in. The setup consisted of brown paper bags full of ‘supplies’, a pencil, and a piece of paper with some questions written on the back and front. When everyone arrived we sat down at the tables and answered the first question on our sheet of paper.

The question was: How long does it take for plastic to erode into the earth? Some said a hundred years; some said a thousand years, but the actual answer was about one billion years! We were all so shocked to hear this. Then the instructor had us draw a ‘blueprint’ of what the robot was going to look like.

When we finished our drawings, he had us open up our paper bags. There we many things in those bags including: bottle caps of all sizes, lego blocks, plastic eggs, plastic bracelets, and a bunch of other plastic items. You are probably thinking to yourself, ‘wow thats a lot of plastic!’ And that’s exactly what the instructor said, but he also said that this is how much plastic the average person uses every day.

Then he asked us to make our robots out of those plastic items. We were clueless at first, but after awhile our creativity clicked in. Ideas started coming faster and faster, and the lines to glue our plastic pieces together started getting longer and longer! Finally, when we had all created our magnificent robots, the instructor had us all answer the other question on our sheet of paper: Why is creativity so important to our world? The answer was that there was no limit because you could make something amazing out of the simplest things such as plastic.

This experience overall was cool and different, and I hope this activity inspired those other creative minds out there to go out and start using their imagination and creativity!

Photos by Julia See, teen photographer