Supriya's Robot

I bought Supriya a Lego kit (Robo Platoon Designer Set, #4881) for Aseem's birthday, trying to combine her interests in robots and building with Lego. The kit comes with a nice booklet with assembly instructions for 9 different robots of three levels of difficulty: Quick Build, Experienced Build and Advanced Build. Supriya was very excited when I gave her the set, and she and I proceeded to build a robot of Experienced Build level. It was a lot of fun for both of us.

Last night, as I came back from a chorus gig at 10:15 or so, Supriya rushed downstairs to show me this robot. It is of Advanced Build level, contains 9 pages of instructions and 10 sub-assemblies -- and she built the whole thing without any help from Manisha! Manisha and I are really impressed by her perseverance and her ability to follow all the complicated 3-D instructions.

The robot looks menacing and scary to me, with its monster-sized guns and rocket-launchers. For Supriya, however, it is a good robot who shoots enemies & defends her. "Those antennae are 'air-coolers,' so that the robot will always be able to breathe." It's interesting how we build totally different stories with the same raw material.

This building sort of fits in with all the building she does around the house. She brings in cushions and pillows into the family room and builds a "fort". Any time we get a decent-sized cardboard box she finds creative uses for it (cutting holes in it for windows and using the box as a house, for example). Three-dimensional and visual thinking seem to be a definite forte (how could I resist that!) of hers.