Want your kids to get a head start on the robotic jobs of tomorrow through the pretense of a little toy fun? If so, you can get them a BEAM Bot Club gift from the Thing of the Month site, and they'll receive a new DIY BEAM Bot once a month for four months, creating monthly anticipation and a warm childhood memory. This may result, many years later, in frustrated young adults wanting to please their parents and choosing engineering when they didn't really want to. Or it may not. BEAM stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics, and the bots usually use simple analog circuits (as opposed to a microprocessor) and are efficiently designed.
The BEAM Bot subscription costs $170, which is about the same if you buy the 4 bots separately on other sites. The available bots include the 9-volt battery-powered Mousebot (with whiskers), the light-propelled Solar Bug, a solarspeeder, and the jitterbug, seen in the video below. And while they aren't too delicate, we'd advise to make sure that you know the temperament of the user - clumsy hands and heavy feet are the enemies of geeky fun.
There's more after the jump.
If the kids catch the bot bug after the subscription, you can move them to finding and buying other BEAM Bots online, or even better, to pick up some of the How-To's available on the net, so that they can begin experimenting. Solarbotics sells separate available BEAM parts and includes good resources to get started.
Since one of the best ways to develop a strong relationship with your kid is to do fun things together (see our GeekDad blog for daily examples), the more certain technologies becomes affordable, the easier it will be to team up to create interesting new personal gadgets and bots.
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