Train an army of children to recycle bottles for you

Computers & Mobile Craft & Design Energy & Sustainability Technology

There’s an odd synchronicity here with last week’s post about the coin-scavenging-crow training machine. This time it’s a whack-a-mole style video game that you play by dropping glass bottles into the slots when they light up. See it work around 0:40.

In a side note, Volkswagen’s Fun Theory Award is now definitely on my radar. Besides this project, their competition to incentivize socially-useful behaviors by turning them into entertainment also produced the world’s deepest rubbish bin and the subway staircase piano keyboard. [via Hack a Day]

4 thoughts on “Train an army of children to recycle bottles for you

  1. Anonymous says:

    this is awesome, like that guy who made the crow vending machine so crows would collect spare change for him. its great to see useless animals performing useful menial tasks

    1. Sean Michael Ragan says:

      Hey, now, I would hardly describe crows as “useless.”

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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