If you're up for a stocking filler, (only 300 days to Christmas!), or just want to encourage a young (or old) inventor, this is one of our favourite products. Sugru is a product that's hard to explain. They call it 'mouldable glue'. Think blu-tack that sets to a silicone rubber. This means that if you can make something out of play-doh, you're qualified to use this, and what you create is not only flexible and impact-resistant, but also temperature resistant as well, as silicone rubber is the substance used to make the modern rubberised style of oven mitt. Create grips for cables, protective bumpers for phones, wheels for your next robot, and much more. From only £15 for a multi-colour 8-pack, it's cheap enough to buy a pack just to play with. https://sugru.com
Forres Project Week
Myself and Tom have spent the week down at Forres Sandle Manor school in the New Forest, running a 'Rockets and Robotics' programme for 14 children. At the end of each year, the school have a 'project week' where all the children choose from a wide range of activities to do for the week, such as cycling, needlecraft, sports and even trips abroad.
We think this is an excellent idea as not only is it a fun way to end the year, but children rarely get an opportunity to explore extra-curricular subjects in such great detail at school. During the week everyone built several rocket kits, designed parachutes, made a programmable robot, soldered a rocket launcher and even built a launch pad! The week went very well and the children even progressed to trying out some of our advanced robots for this year's senior robotics course at our main camps, programming them in C. We hope to be back again next year!