JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Thanks to Nathan Torkington, my daughter is in love with a Tamiya robot horse she’s named Truggy. It all began this fall when I read Nathan’s post on O’Reilly Radar describing how he and his six-year-old son built a robot together. So when time came for Santa to go shopping, she looked for the same Remote Controlled Insect robot but couldn’t find one available. Instead three animal robots arrived at our home: a galloping horse, a beetle which can go backwards and around objects, and a jumping kangaroo. The robots were more complicated to assemble than I had imagined but Ted seemed happy to spend some time putting them together for the girls. Abigail’s happened first on Sunday night, Christmas Day, and she was delighted to see her robot galloping across the floor when Ted finished it after dinner. Before going upstairs to bed, she kissed her horse goodnight. Then Ted assembled the beetle and the kangaroo. The girls are enjoying racing them and watching the beetle turn corners under the sofa. Thanks to Nat and his family for sharing their example – I hope we can encourage each other by sharing how we help our families fall in love with technology (and each other too!).