My coworker and I decided to do a joint program called Battle Bots. We thought it would fit well with our summer reading program (On Your Mark Get Set Read) based on the competition aspect. We knew we wanted it for older kids and opted for kids going into Grades 4th-6th.

To keep the budget reasonable, we asked our community for recyclables that were clean and in good shape. We figured the kids could make their own robots out of these materials. I will explain how we battled them below. Our storytime room ended up looking like a hoarder’s den right before this program. We did have fun laying out everything. This photo does no justice of how many recyclables we really had.

We knew the program was going to have to be an hour and a half. We wanted 30 minutes for building, 30 minutes for battling, and 30 minutes for playing with the library’s own robot. So the minute the kids arrived, we sat them down and explained this outline. We then let them loose to start building and creating.

 

Some of the finished products.

 

Now it was time to battle. We had the kids make their own dice and gave them a piece of paper. We then teamed up the kids. The kids would roll their dice at the same time. Highest number won. Three rolls and a winner declared. The kids would then tell us who won and we moved on to the next round until we came down to two kids.

 

Final Battle:

Once the winner was declared, we moved on to playing with the library’s Sphero 2.0. With 23 kids, I knew I would have to time it out. I gave them each 30 seconds to try and maneuver the robot. They got a total kick out of it.

Verdict: 100% doable for the future. The kids had a blast and they depleted about 90% of our recyclables.