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Description

Decide what makes the best robot, then work together to save tokens and turn your vision into reality.

This activity gets young people saving up recycled items to build a robot together. They earn tokens by playing games and then exchange those tokens for materials to build their robot - they will have to decide what to spend their tokens on - and then vote for the best robot! This could run over a couple of sessions, or a number of weeks (depending how long you want to collect recycled items for), so check out the Before you begin section to see how you could run it.

You might want to run the Pack your Bags activity with your group first to get a taste of budgeting and identifying needs and wants.
Feel free to split this activity across multiple sessions if it works better for you.

Resources

Clean items of recycling
Craft materials (for example, tissue paper, pipe cleaners, stickers)
Glue sticks
Sticky tape
Coloured pens or pencils
Big pieces of card
Something to use as tokens

Setting up this activity
Ask everyone to bring in some clean items of recycling. Household items, such as milk bottles, tin foil, toilet roll tubes and cereal boxes all work really well. If you’ve got space, you could build a collection over a few weeks.
Assign token values to different materials and put them somewhere everyone can see them. Materials you’ve got plenty of should be worth fewer tokens and if you only have a small amount of a material, make it worth more tokens. It’s up to you how you display the values – you could make little signs or write on the materials.

Instructions

Step 1: What makes the best robot?
The person leading the activity should put all of the materials on display and tell everyone that no one ‘owns’ these items, even if they brought them in. They should explain that each item is worth a certain number of tokens and that all of the items are up for grabs.
Everyone should work together to decide what makes the best robot. Maybe it’s the tallest, the shiniest or the one with the most functions? Everyone should choose something achievable that they could try to make with the materials available. If people find it tricky to decide, they could vote on the most popular ideas.
Everyone should split into small teams. Each team should move into their own space.

Step 2: Points make parts
Everyone should play a quick game as or in teams, such as Game of Aim, Noughts and crosses relay or Human knot.
The person leading the activity should give everyone one token for taking part. They should give the winning team three extra tokens, the team that came second two extra tokens, and the team that came third one extra token.
Each group should decide whether they want to spend any of their tokens. The person leading the activity should explain that it’s up to them. If they wait too long then the cheaper materials may disappear, but if they don’t save the tokens up then they may never be able to afford the more expensive materials.
At the end of each game, someone in each team should write down how many tokens their team has combined and how many they have spent on materials so far. Make sure everyone understands that they’re spending their tokens as a team so they need to come to a joint decision.
Everyone should play another quick game and the person leading the activity should award tokens, remind people how many tokens they have and give people the chance to spend them.
Everyone should repeat step four until they’ve played enough games. After the final game, everyone should spend the rest of their tokens.

Step 3: Construct your robot
Each team should sit around their piece of card. The person leading the activity should lay their materials out.
Each team should work together to build their robot by sticking their materials to the piece of card. They should remember the group’s decision about what makes the best robot as they build.
Once everyone’s finished, they should take it in turns to show off their robot to the rest of the group. Does a robot stand out as the best?
The person leading the activity should decide whether there’ll be a winner. Volunteers or young leaders could vote on their favourite. Alternatively, you could give out prizes for best teamwork, best communication, most helpful and best invention.

Reflection
The person leading the activity should congratulate everyone on working together to decide when to save and when to spend their tokens. Did anyone want to spend all of the tokens as soon as they had them? How did it feel to wait and save tokens for better materials? How did it feel when people spent tokens that they’d been carefully saving?

The person leading the activity should explain that people do the same with real money. When people keep their money safe, it collects over time so people can put it towards something that’s more expensive – just like the tokens and the materials. Did anyone find a really good approach to saving their tokens? Maybe some people found a balance where they used some tokens as soon as they got them and saved some towards some of the more exciting materials. Did anyone have a good technique for making decisions? Maybe people kept a list of the tokens they had or asked an adult to separate them into different piles.

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Badge Links

• Money Skills - Budget