PicoCricket fun
For the last two Family Home Evening nights (time on Monday night spent doing something fun as a family), we’ve been working on projects using PicoCrickets. I like them because I can be artsy, Hubby can do “tabots” (“robots,” in Ettin), and we can finish a project with two little boys (1 and 3) in under an hour.
This is what we worked on last night:
Giant wanted to make a rabbit and a carrot. Since the model we wanted to try out was a spinny thingy (really, I’m more of a crafty person than a technical terms person), I suggested that the rabbit could chase the carrot. Then I got to help Giant with his project because mommy had made it suddenly way more complicated than Giant was at first considering:
My spinny thingy was supposed to be much more colourful and fun. But in the interest of time and helping a Giant with his project, I got a framework finished. Just some egg cartons attached with string to egg carton strips. Looked sorta like the swings at an amusement park. Giant and Ettin thought it was fun to stick the lego people in the carton seats (poor lego people):
Hubby’s spinny thingy had two bent lego pieces (not the official name of the piece, although I’m sure my hubby could tell you what it was) attached in such a way that they lifted up when the PicoCricket turned on. He is into the crafy aspect as much as I am into the technical aspect. He also hooked up a sound recognizer (really making up terms here), so that when we made more noise his spinny thingy went faster:
Very fun, and a great way to work together! In the future, I think we will build the PicoCricket structure (the mechanical stuff) first, and then work on the crafty stuff. Ettin was not impressed with most of the time being spent doing stuff he wasn’t interested in (fragile crafty stuff). It was only near the end when we had buttons and lights and noises and movement going that he got into it. But still, for an activity that involves a crafty mom, technical dad, innovative 3 year old, and short-attention-spanned 1 year old, I think this is pretty great! (It seriously brings out feelings of fun creativity that I haven’t enjoyed since art class, many, many years ago.)