The story of Giz the Robot

COEUR d’ALENE — The robot built by 7-year-old Evie Rau of Coeur d'Alene consisted of a thick cardboard tube for the body, compact discs for eyes, a pencil-holder hat, a pizza-cutter arm and a calculator on its chest.

"You type the number on his calculator and it tells him how many slices to cut," Evie said.

Although none of the robots had any real function, about 20 kids and their parents built robots, created comic strips and helped write the story of Giz the Robot during the "Gizmo2Xtremes" event Sunday, hosted by Gizmo-cda at the Coeur d'Alene Public Library.

Evie's mother, Danielle, said it was the first time they had brought Evie to a Gizmo event, but their son had been to some of the space presentations.

"It's good to get girls involved too," Danielle said. "Just let their imagination take off and see what they create."

To create the robots, the kids — and kids at heart — had access to an abundance of parts provided by Gizmo. There were large plastic bolts, as well as real nuts and bolts, straws, plastic tubing, old electronic parts and much more.

"That's what's fun about this kind of station is everyone can take the same kind of materials and do completely different things with it, which is fantastic," said Nick Madsen, youth services specialist for the Community Library Network.

Ethan Shaw, 5, of Coeur d'Alene, built his robot out of a box covered with aluminum foil for the body, a flat metal pan for the head, large red reflectors for the eyes and a melon baller for the mouth.

"His name is Roady," Ethan said as he attached keyboard letters to the robot, spelling out its name.

Ethan had a little help from his parents, Mike Shaw and Erika Hawkins, especially with the hot glue guns. Hawkins said she and her husband grew up home-schooled in Santa Cruz, Calif. They were exposed to projects like the ones done through Gizmo and said it is "pretty amazing." She said they walk by Gizmo (806 N. 4th Street) often and had not yet been inside, but plan to do more with Ethan at Gizmo this summer.

"Stuff like this with the kids, it's so great," Hawkins said. "It's so good for them to learn to be creative and make their vision happen."

Gizmo launched "Gizmo2Xtremes" last week, a year-long project where students and mentors will conspire to explore near space and the depths of Lake Pend Oreille.

"The idea of Gizmo2Xtremes was to do a large project that would involve adults and children in our community," said Barbara Pleason Mueller, executive director of Gizmo.

Mueller said there is "an amazing resource of people" in the community, and when the project was announced an astrophysicist, marine experts and several others offered to help. She said because of their curiosity, kids can help with the project by coming up with questions, and will also help examine data collected.

She said the goal of the near-space balloon launches are to go 100,000 feet, which will bring it to the curvature of the earth, but rather than letting it drift with the jet stream when the balloon pops, it will travel 80 to 200 miles east. A guided vehicle will bring the experiments back and allow the kids and adults on the grounds to view the data.

The other part of the project will take a remote controlled vehicle 1,000 feet to the bottom of Lake Pend Oreille, with another one to look at the surface and both will have cameras and gathering data.

Giz the Robot is the project mascot, so the purpose of Sunday's event was to allow the community to help build his backstory. Some of the questions the kids were prompted to answer included who Giz is, what he is afraid of, what he likes and who his friends are. The robots created Sunday would be his friends.

Throughout the week, Mueller said the stories and robots will be judged to decide which ones are the best and winners will receive prizes, such as free classes at Gizmo.