Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Annedroids Inspires - Recycling and Inventing


A few months ago Madison and I got the chance to screen some episodes of Annedroids - an Amazon Prime original series. Madison took to Anne and her friends quickly, and got to see some amazing feats of engineering and science, coupled with a lot of fun.

Annedroids is a live-action adventure series about "Anne," a young female scientist, her human friends and their android assistants, and the amazing scientific discoveries they make while undertaking the biggest experiment of them all: growing up. The series spotlights, through trial and error, how science, technology, engineering, the arts and math (STEAM) can inspire children to do great things.
Anne and her friends' adventures provide many opportunities to showcase the key processes of STEM, which are often not addressed well in children's television programming. This includes processes involved with identifying problems and asking questions, making plans and creating prototypes, experimenting and testing, reflecting and revising. In particular, it is good to see that Anne and her friends learn as much from failure as success, and see the failures as opportunities to try new things. Anne, the main character of Annedroids, was recently named one of TV's Best Role Models of 2014 by Common Sense media. When faced with a problem, she sees only possibilities-- no amount of failure ever dampens her spirit. Where most people see junk, Anne sees possibility.

Madison loves Anne - as well as PAL, her most advanced android!

Madison was especially drawn to episode 3 - Reduce, Reuse, Robocycle. Anne's friend Nick finds that his lawnmowing chore is pulling him away from spending time in Anne's junkyard invention lab, so the three friends attempt to use robotics to create a automatic mower.

At four years old, Madison isn't yet mowing the lawn. And she's still in that glorious age where helping to vacuum or mop is a treat (please, let this phase last forever). But she hates to clean up her toys. She's too tired. Her arms hurt. This is taking forever. 

So inspired by Anne and her attempts to help Nick out, she attempted to engineer a solution.

Now, she is only four, so she needed some help from me.

Madison wanted to create a scoop. She could go around her room, scooping up the crayons and doll shoes and puzzle pieces, depositing them into the proper places in the blink of an eye.

Madison opted to use a milk carton as the base for our scoop. We started by washing it out.

After this, I had to step in. Madison is still learning how to cut, and I didn't want to let her practice with the sharp scissors. I cut off some of the bottom, leaving a scoop.

Time to decorate!

Madison was excited to use her new scoop and bragged about how fast clean up would happen.  She started off really strong.

Unfortunately, she soon realized that scooping up multiple toys that weren't all stored in the same place wasn't the best and wasn't saving much time. She had to pick through the scoop to put the crayons away, the doll shoes away, the puzzle pieces away.

But there's a great quote that Anne says in the very first episode,

"We didn't fail. We found a new way of doing it wrong".

And she found that the scoop does work really well with the Legos!

National Recycling Week is a real thing, and it's happening right now! Just as Anne uses things found in her junkyard to create new inventions, kids can turn trash into treasure with a little bit of creativity!


I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.
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