Yesterday, Praew arranged a tour of the Fiboland children’s exhibit at the Bangkok Family Center in Bangmod:

We invited 25 children from the Mercy Center to come by and see exhibits created by students of FIBO (The Institute of Field Robotics) where Praew has taught for 16 years. FIBO is an institute at KMUTT (King Mongkut University of Technology in Tonburi).

Each exhibit was created by a team of second year undergraduate students for a class titled “Inventor Studio” which is a project based class with a focus this year on contributing to education in the local community.

Here are a bunch of pictures I took…

One project was an interactive mechanized model+AV presentation of the solar system that the kids seemed to enjoy playing with:

One of the more popular (and well done) projects was a 3D immersive dinosaur presentation which oddly/amusingly requires the participant to stick their head inside of the neck of a rather well made dinosaur model and look at a “holographic 3D display” of different dinosaurs:

(It was a little too small for me to stick my head in myself.)

There was a roboticized interactive marble machine

and an exhibit where they built VR gloves to remotely control a pair of “Iron Man” hands:

An animatronic dinosaur head that you can try feeding different kinds of plastic foods to and it will open its jaws only after detecting that it is the fake meat:

There were two different fun looking exhibits where you get to drive a remotely teleoperated car using a steering wheel and camera feed:

Here is a better view of the course that the robot car was remotely operated in… I thought it was pretty cool:

Here was the other course:

It was kind of fun to be looking up at the giant eiffel tower from the view of the little car.

There was a cute little interactive projection augmented model of a city where the child can control a dam of (projected water) and windmills, turn on the city lights at night and off during the day and even water the trees remotely:

One that interested me was a simple but robust display where kids can mix and match colored cylinders on a device which detects the colors of things you put together and then lights up LED’s whose color is the mix of those colors:

This one is supposed to teach about mixing colors.

My favorite exhibit allowed kids to build their own structures and then place it on a platform that simulates the shaking of an earthquake. It allows visitors to explore the effects of earthquakes on different structures of buildings:

And, of course, no technology exhibit is complete without a station where children can shoot things:

I didn’t fully understand this one, but visitors could do origami and then somehow project it onto a hologram, or something like that:

And what is a children’s exhibit these days without a passport?

Inside, there is a section for each of the stations, and the kids that visit that station can “get their passport stamped” to show that they were there.

There were more exhibits, but you get the idea. Given that the exhibit was entirely student presentations, I was pretty impressed with it. Not everything worked perfectly, but I think it was a great experience for both the students who created the booths and the kids who visited.

After the kids spent a few hours visiting the stations, we treated them to lunch ordered from a nearby restaurant:

And before long, it was time to go back.

I hope the Mercy Center children had fun and maybe even learned something (heaven forbid). It is just possible that one or two of them might be a bit inspired to take a bigger interest in science and technology in school.

And since the exhibit was free for all visitors, we were able to arrange the visit just by paying for transportation and lunch. I just wish the exhibit were open for more days, as it might have been nice to arrange another trip for more kids. But it was a good experience for me. And the kids were surprisingly well behaved, so hopefully we will find other opportunities to share other experiences.

I think the Mercy Center is well run and has a compelling mission, so if you are interested in finding out more about them, please visit their website or even go and visit them in person. There is always room for more people to help out in these young people’s lives.