How To Make A Moving Robotic Hand

This fun activity supports your child’s learning within science. It helps them explore and begin to understand levers, pullies and how joints and ligaments work. This also builds on your child's knowledge of the human body.

The activities also strengthen hand-eye coordination, concentration and attention to detail skills.

The group task at the end enhances your child’s communication skills as they work together to make the robot hand catch each paper ball.

You will need: 

• coloured paper
• sellotape
• scissors
• paper straws
• string
• marker pen

Step 1 

Take a piece of coloured or plain A4 paper. Use a marker and draw around your hand. 

Step 2

Mark down the finger joints on the cutouts (every finger should have three joints between the knuckles and five on the palm from the wrist to each finger)

Step 3

On another piece of paper, cut out a rectangle shape to be the wrist. Tape the wrist onto the hand and make sure it is securely fastened.

Step 4

Take paper straws and cut them to the size of the joints marked on the hand. These don’t need to be exact. When all the paper straws are cut out to the correct size, place them on top of the lines marking the finger joints and glue them then tape them to the hand. 

Step 5

Now it’s time to make the fingers move! Get your string and thread it through each finger joint, starting from the tip of the finger down to the bottom of the wrist. To make this step easier, tape 5cm of the end of the string to form a needle that can be threaded through the straws. Repeat for all five fingers.

Step 6

At this stage, you should have five bits of string at the bottom of the wrist. Get one longer straw and thread all five strings through this. To make the robot hand move, pull on the string coming out of the end of this straw and watch the fingers magically bend together.

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