STUDIO 3D - ART CAR ACTIVITY

ART CAR ACTIVITY - Design a car around your favorite theme, and create a moving (and talking) sculpture
to ride inside!

	Design, build, and decorate a pull-toy art car out of recycled materials found in your home or classroom.
	Create a moving sculpture to ride inside your pull-toy art car, that's controlled by a handheld programmable brick*.
	Record and add music or talking to your sculpture - using a sound recorder*.

Things you'll need to build a pull-toy art car:

Things you'll need to add a moving sculpture inside your toy:

* Before You Begin: This activity involves using a handheld programmable computer, developed by great folks at the MIT Media Lab, called a cricket. Powered by a nine volt battery, the cricket can control two motors and receive input from two sensors. If you don't have access to a cricket, you can use the commercially available Lego RCX brick and compatable software (Robolab or Mindstorms). For option 3 we also use a MIDI sound recorder, a BUS device also developed my the MIT Media Lab.

For programming the cricket, we're going to use Java-based software, also developed by the MIT Media Lab, called Cricket LogoBlocks. If you have access to crickets, it's likely that you have this software as well. If you're using an RCX brick, the Mindstorms or Robolab software is equally functional.

In the third option, we've added a Voice/Recorder - this is a bus device that can record and play back a number of recordings.

Step 1: Decide what kind of mini art-car you want to make. We decided to make a telephone - themed car, using old phone book pages, an old toy telephone toy, and old phone wire to decorate our art car.

Build the sides of the cars by cutting the pieces of styrofoam into the shape you want. Save one rectangular piece to use as a car "floor". Hint: use stiff styrofoam like that used for home insulation, if you don't have styrofoam, use heavy cardboard.

Step 2: Use the wooden dowels to punch holes through the styrofoam to make front and back axles for the wheels.

Step 3: Before we put the wheels onto the axles, we wanted to start decorating our car. Or course, it may be easier for you to decorate after the car is assembled. Since, we're going for a telephone theme, (1 & 2) we covered the side styrofoam pieces with pages from the phone book, and (3) hot-glued the toy telephone onto one side.

Step 4: Now that you have both axles in place, let's add the wheels. Depending on what you found to use for wheels, you may need to punch holes in the center for the axle to go through. We used plastic lids for wheels - some other suggestions: use plastic or wooden tinker toys, cut off the bottom of a plastic or styrofoam cup, or use lego wheels if you have them. Hint: Make sure that your wheels are big enough to lift the car off the ground.

Step 5: After you have the wheels on - let's add a floor to the car. We don't just want to set the piece of foam used for the floor onto the wheel axles, so, about an inch above the wheel axles, we'll insert three dowels into the side foam pieces to be used as support for the floor.

Step 6: Before we glue the floor down, let's add add some yarn so we can pull our toy along the floor.

Step 7: Secure the floor to the floor supports with hot glue.

Step 8: Once you have your car built you can add a moving sculpture to ride inside. We used Lego pieces to build a machine that moves the attached phones in and out. Directions on how to build little machines like this can be found here.

Step 9: Here's the LogoBlocks program we wrote for our machine. It turns on motor "a" for one second then reverses the motors direction before repeating (the "rd" block).

Step 10: Download your code onto the cricket by (1) placing the cricket in front of the interface cricket - make sure both are turned on and the infared receiver and transmitter are facing each other. (2) Under the Cricket menu, select "Download Code" from the drop-down menu. The LED lights on top should flicker while you are downloading.

Step 11: Now that you have your cricket programmed - set the scupture inside the car and your ready to go!

Step 12: Use the voice recorder to add sound to your toy. We recorded the sound of a ringing telephone.

Step 13: Make your recording. The voice recorder has the ability to store and play back many different messages. There are three buttons on the top of the voice recorder. The "MSG#" button is used to select which message storage spot you want to record to. For instance if you want to record to spot number three - press the message button three times. Hold down the "REC" button to make a recording, and use the "PLAY" button to hear your recording.

Step 14: Now let's add to our LogoBlocks program - first we need to enable the voice recorder block groups in the LogoBlocks preferences. Under the edit menu click on preferences. In the preferences dialog box select "Voice-Recorder" and click OK. Now, in the lower left menu click on the SOUND button and you should notice two new blocks available - "vplay" and "vclear". If not you may need to relaunch Cricket LogoBlocks.

Step 15: Here's what your program will look like once you add the play voice recorder trigger. So the "vplay" block will trigger message number one to be played. The "wait 20" block gives a buffer of time for the voice recorder to play before the cricket turns the motor on. Now download the program and you're ready to go!

Check out a video of our final project in action - click on the image to the right. You'll need the Quicktime Plugin to view the video. →

OTHER THINGS TO TRY:

→ Motorize your car as well as the sculpture inside.

→ Make your car smart by adding a sensor!

→ Build an obstacle course for your car to go through. Make it interactive with sensors and motors.

→ Have a mini art car parade with everyone in your class or group.

Want to learn more about art cars and art car parades? Check out some of these websites: