Robot Coloring Pages

The robots on these pages are not here to take over the world. They water seedlings, flip pancakes, walk their robot dog and hang out the laundry. These robot coloring pages imagine a gentle future where machines have ordinary days, which makes them easy for any child to step into.

At home and in the garden, a boxy robot waters a row of seedlings on the windowsill, a chef robot flips pancakes over a wood stove, a robot pushes a lawn mower past a bird bath, sweeps up autumn leaves, prunes a rose bush, hangs socks and shirts on the washing line and pours coffee behind a cafe counter. Out and about, a robot walks its robot dog, holds a little bird on its finger in the park, flies a kite on the beach, fishes from a dock, builds a snowman in a puffy jacket, strolls through the rain under an umbrella, dances through a garden sprinkler with a balloon in each hand and peeks over a picket fence with a periscope head.

Some robots have bigger jobs: a tracked rover rolls through a deep canyon, a drill-arm robot digs in a quarry under the stars, a solar-winged robot soaks up the sunrise in the desert, a submersible collects shells from the seafloor, another climbs a ladder to fix a windmill, and a robotic arm lifts a toy car off a factory conveyor. The tender pages are some of the best: a robot shelters a kitten from the rain, a robot family walks through the daisies, a teacher robot points at a screen for a class of little robots, a robot plays the cello, one repairs a smaller robot in the workshop, and a robot dog sleeps curled up in a basket. A tiny robot sits in a teacup, a clockwork robot shows the gears in its chest, a robot stands covered in swirling patterns, and a gear mandala fills a page with cogs and springs.

Where the word came from

The word robot is younger than most people think. It first appeared in 1920, in a play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek called R.U.R., about a factory that builds artificial workers. Čapek later credited his brother Josef with the word, taken from the Czech robota, which means forced labor or drudgery. Real machines that could move and work on their own came much later: the first industrial robot arm went to work in a car factory in the early 1960s, doing the kind of lifting shown on the conveyor page here.

Today robots explore places people cannot easily go. Rovers drive across the surface of Mars, submersibles map the deep sea, and robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers do the chores at home, which is exactly what the robots on these pages are busy with.

Coloring a robot

There is no wrong color for a robot, which is the fun of it. A few ideas that look good:

• Classic metal: light and dark grays with one bright color for the lights and buttons.
• Retro toy: red, yellow and blue, like the tin robots of the 1950s.
• Shiny copper and brass for the clockwork robot, with each gear a slightly different shade.
• Glowing panels: leave the screens and eyes white, then color a thin ring of bright green or blue around them so they seem to light up.

Children can also invent a color code: one color for everything that moves (arms, wheels, gears) and another for everything that stays still.

Simple robots and busy workshops

Robots are built from rectangles and circles, which makes the simplest pages friendly to young children learning to stay inside the lines. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

The detailed pages fill the space with tools, gears, reef or canyon walls. Lots of detail begins with:

• Sleeping robot dog
• Scrapyard robot
• Patterned robot

Design your own robot

These pages are a good start for a small STEM afternoon. After coloring, ask a child what job their robot would do, then draw it on the back of the page: what tool does it need at the end of its arm, does it roll or walk, where does its power come from? A robot that waters plants needs a tank; one that explores a canyon needs tracks. Older children can label the parts like an engineer's drawing: sensor, motor, battery, gripper.

Printing robots

Every page is a free A4 PDF drawn at 300 dpi. A4 prints at full size, and on US Letter "fit to page" shrinks the drawing by about six percent so every bolt and antenna stays on the paper. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack puts a whole robot workshop into one file. More machines and worlds to explore are in the space coloring pages and the solar system coloring pages, and more robots in disguise and bricks to build with in the Transformers coloring pages and the LEGO coloring pages.