House construction

My son has an EV3 and loves using this book for simple projects. He is in the 4th grade and has been doing robotics for about a year and a half. It seems like the majority of these projects are simple but then again, that is the title of the book. So it is a fair statement. I would recommend this book to any kiddos who are starting out in robotics. It’s also helpful for my son to gain other ideas for building, especially for first lego league competitions and what not.

Until we came across this book my six year old and I had been following the typical routine of following a book or internet instructions adding a few creative modifications here and there at the end. Building this way does give you experience and teaches you tricks and principles but it can also make robotics seem more daunting than it should be because you can’t help but be awed and intimidated by the intricate designs of people who are expert builders. Your six year old is not going to try to modify that complicated steering mechanism which took four pages of book instructions to explain.
In contrast most of the things built in Isogawa’s book are explained in just one or two picture frames. Everything is a mechanism, beautifully and simply presented to invite you to want to understand the ideas at work and experiment and tinker yourself. My son started flipping through the almost entirely visual book on his own and was immediately drawn in. The first thing he built were a few of the designs for changing motor rotations into ‘lifting’ motions. Before very long it felt like both of us had crossed a threshold into a new world with endless new possibilities, learning and exploration ahead.
It is said that the Japanese are known as master craftsmen and for the beautiful functional simplicity of their designs. This book proves it so.