Andrea Elson shows children the results of their flashlight movement on the slow-shutter camera during the library’s LED painting activity.
As part of its summer reading program for kids – which this year had the artistic theme of Color Our World – the Haddonfield library has held a series that combines technology and art.
The Robo-Art series – which concludes on Wednesday, Aug. 27 – has featured a variety of projects that give children the opportunity to be creative with technology. Andrea Elson is the library’s emerging technology technician, so she handles much of what goes on in the library’s tech center.
Elson had the idea to combine the summer reading theme with her section of the library, holding four events throughout July and this month that helped kids create projects and crafts with technology.
The first creation was a pool noodle doodlebot, a robot powered by a motor that is capable of drawing. The device was made out of markers and pool noodles for the bot’s base. In a doodlebot, the motor and its counterweight create vibration, making the doodlebot spin and dragging the attached markers across the paper to create designs.
The second project involved using an app-enabled robot called Sphero to paint, using the small, ball-shaped device to spread paint across the canvas.
Both programs allowed the children to experiment with and learn some of the basics of robotics and get introduced to the field without making it seem overly complicated.
The third project was LED light painting, in which a slow shutter camera app was used to capture the movement of light from different flashlights in a darkened room. The result was glowing drawings in the air that could only be seen by the camera. Children drew stars, circles and abstract shapes in the air, experimenting with various colors and sizes of flashlights to see what worked best in the photos.
The kids also tried making frames around their faces, holding the light still to illuminate them for several seconds before moving the light in squiggles or other shapes to try to create the illusion of a frame.
All of the projects are aimed at mid- to upper-elementary-age kids, as Elson wanted to find more ways to involve that age range in the library’s programming.
“Traditionally, libraries are very popular for preschoolers and story times, and we really were trying to engage the slightly older kids in new ways to do things,” she explained. “Maybe they like playing on their iPhones with photos. This is a new way to think about that.
“Maybe they like painting,” she added. “But also using a coding robot to paint is another cool opportunity.”
The final project in the series was making a GlowForge keychain that has a child’s name on it using the GlowForge laser cutter.
All of the tech-based art projects placed a heavy emphasis on exploration and experimentation, giving the kids the freedom to play around with the technology to learn more about it.
“In any of our STEM programs, while there’s an end goal or project in mind, the process is really what the program is about,” Elson noted. “They’re about trying things out, having ideas, being creative. It’s the scientific process, but also the creative process.”
