Technology is my hobby, and maybe my career
Kidsday reporter Zachary Corallo, of St. Anne's School, Garden City, working on his robotics. Credit: Sarah Corallo
I love technology — it’s one of my favorite hobbies. My favorite part about tech is something people from the past thought was only the imagination of a child, robots! I’ve made about 11 in my career.
I’ve got a huge collection of parts I build my own robots with, and I test out robotic toys from England. In my collection I have about 70 parts, and it’s actually not hard to get to that number if I’ve only made 11 robots.
My career on the other hand, is much more exciting. Last Christmas I got the Gamer Kit, made by the company Tech Will Save US (TWSU). It was an old-school digital game kit that you can build and program your own games. TWSU has a website where you make an account and join their inventors club to design your own projects. It’s so easy to program, it’s almost unreal.
I started making projects and sharing them in the TWSU community. One of the brand managers in London saw my projects and really liked them, so he emailed my mom and set up a video call. My mom and I Skyped with him about my ideas and how I liked the Gamer Kit. I even told him ways that I thought would be even better so more kids would play with it longer.
The guys in London said they liked my ideas and said that since I am so into their brand, they would send me a different kit for free. It was a robot kit called the Micro:bot. It is a robot car powered by a mini computer called the Microbit. I totally recommend this to robot beginners. The Microbit is smaller than my library card and was designed by TWSU and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) so that kids like me can learn about coding and robotics. The great thing is it works on its own or with other systems that makers use like the Raspberry Pi.
I recently built a robot with a Microbit called the Slothbit. It’s a classical walking robot that you can program to run, walk, dance or balance. It was super-fun building it with my mom, and I loved the part where we had to get in sync with the legs, or calibrate them, and it took two days!
If you’re not experienced with coding and building, it is super-easy to get started because there are many websites for kids to learn about programing. If you want to get started and learn about coding I recommend these:
- Scratch: scratch.mit.edu
- Tech Will Save Us: techwillsaveus.com
- Dexter Industries GoPi GoBox: dexterindustries.com/gobox
Michelle Indrieri’s fifth-grade class, St. Anne's School, Garden City
