Well, we're coming up to the end of the semester and the days of Final Presentations and Soft Opening.

Our robot painter paints! We've had successful tests of it copying people's drawings and are currently playtesting it with kids. There have been some minor errors, but it's all a part of the debugging process.

So debugging is underway. The mechies are hard at work fabricating the box and external parts to the installation, such as the front-panel interface an the stylus.

The kids really respond to the Lynxie well. I'm impressed at how patient they are when they watch the robot draw. They're fascinated by her. One of the things I found interesting was that at first, they drew whatever they wanted, then after a few times, they wanted to challenge the robot to draw something more complex, such as mixing colors or drawing more concrete images.

On Monday, we drove down to the Children's Museum to do some playtesting of painting materials and paper sizes. We were trying to see what was most commonly used and what the kids preferred when painting.

Our observations showed us that kids under 5 tended to not care about the structure of what they were drawing. Even younger seemed to be more concerned with the tactile feeling of the brush and paint and mixing the colors together. Younger kids were done very quickly and were satisfied with quick scribbles on paper. The older kids, around 7 yrs old, would spend longer on the paintings and be almost meticulous about the placement of their colors.

The Children's Museum had a good answer to the question of what paper size to use by having square-cut paper at 14in x 14in. This lets the kids decide to draw portrait or landscape. Keeping around the 14in marker seems to be a good idea considering the size of the kids.

I think the most interesting thing was when Betsy asked these 2 girls about robots. When she asked them whether they liked robots, they both said no. But when Betsy asked what if a robot could paint them a picture, they said they thought it would be so cool.