the Setting

Every year AVAM hosts an extravaganza called the Kinetic Sculpture Race. Two-story-high poodles, frogs, and chickens trek across a 15 mile course throughout Baltimore going over mud, sand, and into the Inner Harbor. The sculptures must be able to fit under the traffic lights, and they must be human-powered. The week before the event, AVAM held a bunch of kinetic workshops including the Krickets are Invading the Park!!! and the Automata Workshop with London's Cabaret Mechanical Theater founder.

Beth made a miniature replica of Patterson Park where people could put their sculptures on display complete with minature trees and lakes. Patterson Park is where the sculptures go through the mud and sand pit portions of the course on the day of the race. Watch the video! It's a 2 MB mpeg4 video, so you'll need to download Quicktime 6 to watch it. You can click on any of the photos on this page to see larger versions of them.

our Ideas

As we talked about the idea for this workshop, Beth kept on mentioning how she liked the Cricket examples that were more "people-powered". Building on that, and knowing that we had only an hour and a half, we decided it would be interesting to focus on building some interesting sensor examples to jump-start people's ideas. This is similar in spirit to the "motion-modules" we had at the NMAH Mindfest, but instead of making output modules, we wanted to make input modules. Some of these are inspired by other PIE ideas.

	Party Detector - Blow into this party favor to get the light sensor to trigger when it's fully opened		Boredom Sensor - Waiting too long for your late friend? Tap your fingers and light sensors hidden inside the glove awaken a blueberry container.
	Birthday Cake - the internal temperature sensor detects when the lucky person blows out the candles		Stomp - Attach two high-tech aluminum shoes with rubber bands, and start running! (or make an electronic drum kit the same way)

some Stories

Of course, our idea didn't really pan out for everyone, for a number of reasons. People's prior experience with computers and the other materials varied greatly, and we didn't have much time. However, as always, there were a few moments and stories that we found particularly interesting...

> the AVAM barn
One of the special things about workshops at AVAM is the way in which the aesthetics of the sculpture or project come first, and then inspire the use of the technology. Beads connected to a styrofoam ball look really nice, but when they are in motion they become hair! Part of this is due to the "variety" of materials on hand - from strange miniature figures of mermaids to large cardboard cones. More importantly, the workshops take place in a space very similar to an art studio - ongoing projects fill the large barn.

> collaborative construction
Our last session was filled with students from a local art college, one of whom was quite drawn to the programming (with LogoBlocks). She experimented with many of the available block commands until finding a behavior she liked, and then walked around showing it to other groups. As it turned out, her design fit well with another groups' spinning pink feather "Head of Doom", and their two creations became one!

> getting technical
A smaller group of young teenagers from an after-school center decided to create a basketball player that would do a jump shot (or maybe a reverse-lay-up?). They weren't familiar with LEGO bricks as a building material, but gathered some of our examples around to get ideas for a motion that would work. They proceeded to spend the better part of the afternoon trying various gearing mechanisms, discovering gear reduction and exploring the art of LEGO design. In the end they settled on building something completely different - a bat cave adorned with swimming fish - but it moved with a fluid motion thanks to all their earlier exploring!

> the craft car
One younger girl came up to us with a car she had made, wanting to make it move. The problem was that it was made totally out of the craft materials, so the axles were fixed and the wheels didn't roll! Pat tried a number of designs with her, ending up with an additional axle that could spin in the center, and driving that with a pulley from a LEGO motor. The nice thing was that it was a car that really only had one LEGO component, and she could take it home and power it with a battery.