Over the last six months, we explored a variety of tinkering activities for a LEGO pull-string motor through a collaboration with partners from LEGO Idea Studio (Amos Blanton, Liam Nilsen), Care for Education (Brent Hutcheson and Duncan Beaton), and Quarterre (Nick Mannion). The motor has a variety of possible building points: a hole for a LEGO Technic axle, a disk with LEGO studs, and more studs throughout the body of the motor. The pull string activates the spinning axle and disk, no power required. We honed in on two activities: critters and their environments and automata.

In this activity, we asked participants to create sculptural kinetic contraptions made from LEGO and everyday craft materials. They use linkages and a pull-string motor as the foundation for movement, and animate a story, scene, or character with the addition of materials like paper, feathers, or googly eyes. If you're interested in trying something similar, LEGO offers a wind-up motor that offers similiar functionality. 

 

Getting Started

Materials

 

 

For building a LEGO automata, we like to use a combination of LEGO Techic pieces and craft materials. The Technic pieces form the "skeleton" of the automata's structure and movement. We've found the craft pieces to be important to support the narrative component of creating a LEGO Automata sculpture. Learners are able to personalize their creation by drawing or collaging additional elements. Some learners even use these materials to provide additional mechanical pieces as well! Paper is an especially effective material because it is lightweight and can sit between beam-and-pin constructions and move flexibly.  

Building the Pull-String Motor Base & Linkage Support

To get started, use double stick tape  to attach your base plate to a thin sheet of plywood for additional support. This will allow you to move or lift your sculpture without it bending or breaking.

Next, build a base for your pull-string motor to raise its height. We like using an alternating pattern of two-2x6 bricks, then three-2x4 bricks, then repeating two-2x6 bricks. This pattern provides stability when pulling the string. You may also choose to super glue these bricks to the motor, and super glue the whole assembly to the base (with the pull-string going off the edge). The resistance of the spring inside the motor is powerful and can pull your creation apart if you’re not careful. If you don’t want to glue the pieces together, be sure to remember to hold the motor in place with your hand every time you pull the string.

For the crank, use an axle 6 through the motor with a LEGO Beam 2x4 Bent 90 degrees (2 and 4 holes) on one side and a bushing on the other to hold it in place. The L-shaped beam should spin smoothly when you activate the motor, but not wiggle back and forth too much.  

For making your linkage, it’s helpful to have an additional vertical support. We like to use three-2x4 LEGO technic plates with holes stacked on top of each other attached to a LEGO Cross Block Beam Bent 90 degrees with 4 pins. Attach a 16-hole beam to the remaining two pins. You may choose to glue this assembly together as well, but don’t glue it to the base plate. You’ll want to be able to move it later as you build your linkage.

Tinker with Making a Linkage

Linkages can take many shapes and forms. For building your LEGO Automata, start by attaching two 16-hole beams at one end with a gray connector pin. Use the gray pins to attach a one beam to your L-shaped crank and the other to your vertical support. As you put these pieces together, have a look from above to make sure things are lined up in even planes and not pulling backwards or forwards.

Activate the motor (don’t forget to hold it when you pull the string!) and notice what happens. How are the beams moving? Can they move freely, or is there a point where they get stuck? This is the point in the process where you can really start tinkering! Notice what changes when you reconfigure the pieces. Some things you can try are:

• Changing where your beam is attached to the L-shaped crank
• Changing where the two beams meet (end-to-end, T-intersection, or crossed)
• Changing where the second beam attaches to the vertical support
• Changing the distance of the vertical support from the motor (making it closer or farther away)
• Experimenting with the length of the beams

 

 

Most importantly, remember that linkages are tricky! They take time and iteration to troubleshoot, and often will move in ways you don’t expect. Over time, you’ll get the hang of figuring out how to make them move the way you want them to.

LEGO is an especially useful material for tinkering with linkages because it allows for iteration in the design process. As you build you can track what different positions and configurations you’ve tried, and it’s easy to go back and undo those changes if you’d like to revisit an earlier idea. While that’s still a possibility with materials like cardboard and wire, undoing a change can be much more challenging.

Here are a few starting points: you can make linkages that move up and down, swing back and forth, or open and close like a pair of scissors. When facilitating this activity for a group of learners, we like to have many possible starting point linkages already built, and encourage learners to start experimenting by making changes to the existing structures.

As you gain comfort with how your linkage moves, you can add complexity by building on secondary movements or adding angled or extension pieces to exaggerate the motion.

DESIGN YOUR ANIMATED SCULPTURE

As you’re building, you may ask yourself, “What does this motion remind me of?” Could it be a person waving an arm? A boat on the sea? The snapping jaws of an alligator? The possibilities are endless! Alternately, you can consider what story you want to tell and how you can use the linkages in your LEGO Automata to add motion to that story. When working with construction paper, you can create individual elements to add onto your linkage or create more complex jointed pieces. Double sided tape is helpful for attaching pieces to beams or onto the base plate. Brads and small hole punches can also add jointed motion. You may also choose to add feathers, googly eyes, or other craft materials to give your creation personality.

 

 Take it Further

Automata and linkages can be made out of many different materials and in many different sizes. You can explore using cardboard, foam, trash, wire, and wood for making the core of your automata design. You can also play around with scale to see how big or small you can make them. You can even try alternating between 2D and 3D designs for what you create.

This project was made possible through the generous support from the LEGO Foundation

Last week we kicked off our first Bay Area Maker Educator meetup of the year with a focus on Cranky Contraptions and iteration! We've always been fans of automata and mechanical motions, and have done several variations on this theme over the past 10+ years. Amy and I put together a timeline showing some of the major milestones of how the activity has developed over time. Many people ask us where our activity ideas come from, and reflecting on this history gave us the opportunity to show that many of the new approaches we've tried have been inspired by artist visits, new materials, and even things we saw on Twitter!

After a brief introduction to materials, the group dove right into designing their cranky contraptions. Some folks started from exploring the mechanism and deciding what to create later, while others had a specific vision in mind and iterated to acheive that goal. For example, Christy was inspired by the idea of a waving heart, and you can see her tweet about it below.

Made my first cranky contraption last night at @TinkeringStudio! Been wanting to make one for a while. Looking forward to future iterations/ideas I now have! #makered #makers @STEAMcentric #crankycontraptions @exploratorium pic.twitter.com/9HVOhX5BAl

— Christy P. Novack (@christypnovack) January 11, 2019

We ended the session with a conversation on what we value about iteration as a process for learning and building, and set goals for ourselves on what we'd like to iterate on in our own practice as educators over the next year. What do you value about iteration? Or do you have a making & tinkering-related goal for the new year? Take the conversation over to Twitter and message @tinkeringstudio to share ideas and insights!

In the Tinkering Studio, we like to say that the process of tinkering will get you stuck, then you'll find a way to get yourself unstuck. I was feeling pretty stuck with our current sound prototyping so I decided one way I'd try to work through that was by taking a break to work on something completely different. Which brings me back to weaving. It's been a while since we last prototyped this idea, and I've been wanting to return to finding a way to use Scratch to help generate a pattern.

The image below shows a quick bit of Scratch code I put together that creates a series of 10 different colored circles based on randomly picking a zero or a one. The color of the circle represents what would show on my final woven pattern. A orange circle means weave over the warp thread and a blue circle means weave under the warp thread. (Quick note: warp are the vertical threads, weft are the horizontal ones.)

By re-running the program over and over again, I could get "instructions" on what to do with my woven project. One rule I set for myself was to do whatever the program generated, even if it wouldn't be the best for the overall look of the final product. One thing that surprised me is that random means there will be some some unusual outliers. For example, one line got four orange followed by six blue. Another was a perfectly symmetrical pattern.

Then there was the really weird one that was all orange except for one!

What I liked about this process was that it allowed me to use Scratch in a way that was meaningful for my goal and outcome. It also really made me rethink my understanding of what randomness means. I expected there to be a lot more basic over-under patterns generated, but in actuality the results were way more varied than that.

As a next step, I'd like to explore what tinkering with a starter set of code could look like for translating what's on the screen to a physical object. This was significantly easier than past mapping strategies I've used, so I think there's potential to keep going with these experiments!

This project was made possible through the generous support from the LEGO Foundation