Project: Moving Mother's Day Card with littleBits

Papercraft, LEGO and littleBits, now those are brilliant ingredients to get creative. Over the weekend, we cleared the kitchen table and got out our coloured card, sticky tape and scissors. The boys decided to make a Moving Mother's Day Card. (Good idea kids, Mother's Day is coming up soon in the UK)

Read how we made a selection of paper flowers and made them move with littleBits. (We have a Premium and Space Kit littleBits set)


Also See: Gadgets & Gizmos Invention Kit by littleBits | littleBits Review

Paper Flowers

We made three different flowers: orange hearts (technically not a flower, but we loved the little box), purple hyacinths and a yellow daffodil.

Pinterest is a fantastic resource for paper flower inspiration. Check out our board with some ideas to get you started. The heart shaped flowers (box) were made using a template from MinieCo. If you have a craft cutter at home, you can use it to cut out the box. It was a bit too precise cutting for my little one without help.



Making paper flowers with kids is really fun and a great way to explore different types of paper construction methods. We got in a right sticky mess with sticky tape and glue.

We had to use our creative thinking skills to adjust our flowers to work with the littleBits.

Adding littleBits Electronics

As we made the flowers our ideas of how we'd like to make them move started to form. My son wanted the heart boxes to light up, so we added the Long LED into two of the heart boxes and secured it with sticky tape. He loves the vibration motor so we made our third heart box buzz. The hyacinth was asking to spin around, so we made it using a straw to fit onto the DC Motor. The pinwheel daffodil was attached to the Servo to swing this way and that way. He wanted the moving flowers to be triggered with a button, so we used the pressure sensor.

We've included a list of all the littleBits we used for our project - make sure you scroll to the bottom.

• Other Projects: Minecraft Diamond Sword | littleBits Christmas scene

The hardest part was putting it all together and figuring out how to fix the bits in place securely. We used loom bands to hold bits together and sticky tack to secure them to our base made of LEGO.

We used a Branch as all our moving parts had to come after the pressure sensor. My son, drew a lovely picture which we used to hide the electronics. A little slit in the card allowed the pressure sensor feature in the front.

Craft lollisticks were used to support the servo on the daffodil. We needed a method to hold everything together - LEGO of course.

Building a Stand

My son, still loves his Duplo LEGO, and they made a perfect building material for our project. We used a base and he came up with the idea to build the card between two short LEGO towers. He also used sticky tack to secure to littleBits to the Duplo (the large connectors of Duplo don't easily fit to littleBits)

Front

Back

With our moving Mother's Day Card secure, he added decorative LEGO to finish it off. And there it is our Papercraft, littleBits, LEGO Mother's Day creation.

Make It Yourself

Papercraft items we used:

• Card
• Sticky tape, sticky tack, loom bands
• Scissors, colouring pencils
• Pipe cleaner, straw, craft lollisticks

littleBits we used:

• Power with a 9V battery
• Pressure sensor
• Branch
• Wire
• Long LED x 2
• Servo
• Vibration motor
• DC Motor

Duplo LEGO

• 2 x 4 and 2 x 2 bricks
• base
• decorative items (vine & flower)

• Top Tip: Select which paper flowers you want to make and first decide which littleBits Outputs (Green Bits are Outputs. They make stuff happen) you want to use. These two decisions will affect how you make the flowers.

Try to use regular LEGO or another construction material to make a stand / base. Have fun making a creative moving Mother's Day Card.


Source: Heart Box