Hello Everyone!

Well, I’m very excited to tell you about this week’s Theme of the Week because we are spending the day today at ROBOTFEST!

Which is to say: this week’s Theme of the Week is: ROBOTS! #bobbledyrobots

Yes, Robotfest is an annual event over at the National Electronics Museum in Linthicum, Maryland. It’s about an hour and a half away from our barn in Chestertown, but we had so much fun there last year, we figure it’s worth the trip.

I know, I know, we probably should have told you about it before, so that those of you who are in the area could plan for a visit. But we didn’t. Sorry about that. If you have the chance and a free schedule today, though, head on over. Wear your sunglasses for $1 off admission (though elementary kids and younger get in for free anyway)!

Anyway. Here’s the deal: robots are cool. Most of the time that we think of robots, we think of robots like this:

(We met R2 at Robotfest last year, before August knew that pushing buttons on a droid is not a good idea).

Or, maybe like this:

(We didn’t meet any Transformers, but we DID make some kind-of-transformers out of cardboard with interchangeable modular parts):

But as much as we’d like our robots to look and behave kind of like people, most of the robots in the world are actually used to do things that we don’t like to do or that we can’t do as efficiently as machines. (The word “robot” actually comes from the Czech word “robotnik” which means “slave” from the word “robotiti” to work, or to drudge, which basically means to do really boring awful things that are no fun at all). Like, take little crackers (or something?) from one conveyor belt and put them neatly onto another:

That would be a really hard job for a human to do without getting super tired (or super bored, or super irritated).

Robots are also used to do more complicated things, like stack pancakes:

You see, if you had a PERSON like ME doing that job, not only would your pancakes have fingerprints all over them, but they would probably have a bunch of bites taken out of them, because I LOVE pancakes! In fact, there’s a funny old TV episode where Lucy and Ethel go to work in a chocolate factory and have to wrap candies (this was back in the old days before they had robots to do this kind of work):

So – it’s a good thing we’ve figured out a way to get robots to help us out. But aside from doing the boring and repetitive jobs, engineers are also developing robots that can do rescue missions that would be too dangerous for humans (like saving people from fires or floods). So robots are definitely going to be around more and more in the future.

So for this week, we’d like you to think about what kind of robot YOU would invent, and what would you invent it to do? Post your ideas and pictures here in the comments or on Instagram using #bobbledyrobots. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

And – we’ll give you the run-down on this year’s RobotFest later in the week. Happy Robot Week!!!