Lynxie's Art Studio is in its new home at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh!

This past Saturday, May 9, was our Grand Opening. With great fanfare of balloons, posters, and a slide show, the finished exhibit was set up on the floor of the Children's Museum and opened for public use. Thank you to everyone who came and helped make this day a success! It was especially great to have our interns there to help with the setup and to have them be able to demo their own project, the tic-tac-toe playing robots.

Here are some pictures from the day:

Grand Opening Overall

Grand Opening Front

Grand Opening Child Drawing

Grand Opening Child Watching

Last week, most of our team members took a research trip to New York City. There, we attended the Toy Industry Association Toy Fair and the Toys R Us.

At the toy fair, we were able to see first hand many of the robotics toys currently on the market. In addition, we gained valuable contacts in the area of children's painting products. It was also very useful to study toys which have been designed for our target demographic. This will be particularly helpful in our interface design.

At Toys R Us, we each built our own robots as part of the RobotGalaxy exhibit. Here, we were able to create a robot by choosing a torso, arms, and legs, each with their own unique functions. We then assembled and named them. We also explored the many other robotics toys within the store.

I have attached a few research papers by Illah Nourbakhsh, Tom Lauwers and Emily Hamner from the Robotics Institute at CMU. Their work is very much along the same lines as our project, so it seems like it may be useful to build off of their work. If you get a chance, you may want to skim through the articles.