This week, Michelle Johnson, our Digital Artist, writes a guest blog about how she created the new robot character for our robotics curriculum. Read Michelle’s blog to find out how Socket, our favorite little robot friend, came to be.
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Socket, our new robot friend at Robomatter, began as an idea to enhance our robotics curriculum to appeal to our younger audiences. We wanted a character that students could relate to, a robot with human-like features that could grow with knowledge as the student grows throughout the curriculum, like another classmate.
Here you can see the concepts we brainstormed for Socket, focusing on the different shapes and sizes the robot could have. Ultimately, we decided on the enlarged design , which drew some inspiration from things like Pixar’s WALL-E and Cartoon Network’s Gir from Invader Zim.
Because we knew he would be recreated in a variety of different poses, Socket was assembled in Adobe Illustrator to be line-less and made of basic shapes for simplicity.
In addition to appearing in different poses, Socket develops throughout our robotics curriculum, just as students’ knowledge and skills will develop. One of the main ideas behind our curriculum is that STEM education provides a set of tools that are useful in everyday life, not just in the classroom. As students progress through our curriculum, they learn important skills like teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and computational thinking. They also develop an understanding of how computer programming can be used as a problem-solving tool. We mirror this development in Socket. As Socket develops, it becomes more apparent how robotics can relate to students and their lives!