Toys commercially available for children who are toddlers or preschoolers provide a starting place for children to think about the function of movement. Robotics isn’t always visible though. Layers of packing materials or layers of moving pieces can be linked together. Some are electrical and don’t show their movement until the whole sequence is complete, it is invisible to the seeing eyes and can move over a longer distance from the start of the finger button push to another area of the toy.
Arms and legs are a part of basic animatronics. Kids carry around dolls and action figures for a long time in early childhood. Bikes and cars and general transportation are toys they use as well. Except. Transportation toys tend to come with only certain types of ability to get into them, to open and close doors, to open and close engine covers, to remove or put back together trays or roof’s or trailers. How much time kids spend with an adult who tinkers. Gives them insight into what is under the hood. The larger the toys the easier it is to manipulate and look at all the pieces and see how they are shaped, how heavy they are, they can be hand held, moved, carried and relocated or attempted to fit into other locations of the same toy e.g. spare wheel can fit inside the drivers cabin.
Building up layers requires an understanding of 3D. And then it doesn’t. Some sequences can literally just be a page, that gets layered with another page, and then another page and then another page on top of that. Like a book. To understand it you need to open it and see inside the layers. When robotics and animatronics toys are shaped into a base with pieces that are attached but separated from each other, it is easier to understand how the flow of the robotics works because there are storage compartments within each piece. Yes sometimes they are empty but if they have an active element attached to it e.g. light then the connections are underneath.
