self assembly toy

I've been thinking about the idea of a physical self-assembly toy for a while. Today I made my first prototype and it works! Woohoo!

It all started a couple years ago when I was working at a non-profit called Concord Consortium, helping to make curriculum for kids around some molecular dynamics simulation software. We were playing around building lots of models, and trying to make them interactive in interesting ways. I started making small molecules in square and triangle shapes, and applying electrostatic charges to their sides. In a "heat bath" jostling them around, they would self-assemble into different larger shapes it was lots of fun. I made an activity around this, building up to a construction environment where kids could create their own self-assembling structures. I wrote a little newsletter article about it. Here's where you can try out the simulations (click "launch activity").

So of course, I wanted to make a physical toy from this idea- a kind of construction kit with lots of 2D shapes, each having magnets embedded in the sides ("monomers"). They'd have various geometries, and different combinations of magnet polarities. There would be a flat box with a clear top that you would pick a set of monomers, and put them in, then gently shake it to see how your monomers assemble.

Saul Griffith's incredibly cool phd work was an inspiration for this. I originally proposed to turn the toy idea into a class project in an elaborate way with electronics controlling electromagnets (here's my initial brainstorm), but this seemed to hard. So now I'm back to the simple idea.

Today I made a set of wedge-shaped monomers, with magnets embedded in the slanted sides. The idea is that they will self-assemble into a ring. And it works! Check out the video below.