The kids are always drawing characters and writing, and I was wondering – could we use this to make a game together?

It turns out, we can.

I’d guess in about 30 hours, we’ve put together a small world where:

• The player can wander around our world
• The kids have both drawn characters that appear in the game
• My 7 year old has designed a couple of maps
• Together with my 7 year old, we have written some dialogue
• I figured out how to build out some simple logic, connecting scenes

First, I looked into various game making tools.  I ended up using Stencyl, the first one I tried.  I checked it out first because the free version is limited only in that it only allows you to publish your game to the web (as opposed to desktop or mobile versions), and, for me, a big bonus was that it runs in Linux.

I was really impressed, and would recommend it to anyone thinking of doing something similar.  There is a small library of assets you can use in your game, adding logic is similar to logic blocks in Scratch.

I did get stuck in a couple of places:

• The recommended system for character dialog is not built-in, and instructions for installing it were hard for me to find.  I posted a question to the Stencyl forum, and the extension’s author sent me a link to the Stencyl Dialog Extension installation instructions within a couple of hours
• I struggled adding the extension to my game – someone has put together a Dialog Extension Youtube Tutorial which helped out
• Other small things – usually when I create something, with a little searching, I can usually find answers pretty easily on Stack Exchange.  I found it harder to find answers my issues with Stencyl, and spent more time trying different things – I think, largely due to a smaller development community

It wasn’t until we started that I realized how much effort is required to put together the artwork for a game.  It is one thing to scan in a drawing of a character, but another to create drawings of the character from every perspective, such that it is animated as it walks across the screen.

At this time, it’s not much of a game – just a small world to explore.  But it was fun to put together – you can check it out here: http://willowdale.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

My 7 year old recently acquired a fish bowl with a betta fish.

Apparently, the PLA plastic used in 3D printers doesn’t degrade significantly in a fish tank, so I started looking for aquarium decorations we could print.  And I came across a design for a fish feeder: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1257953

I started modifying it to accommodate our fish bowls.  She asked to help out, so I suggested she do a sketch of her design.

Her design has a timer, and uses a suction cup to attach the feeder to the bowl.  I was skeptical, but she found a suction cup and demonstrated it would stick to the curved wall of the bowl.

I then set her up with Tinkercad.  Here’s the 3D model she made of her design:

Our fish feeder is still a work in progress, we’ll post pictures of our project when it is complete.

About a month ago, my youngest daughter borrowed a really neat toy called “Talkative Chick’s House Ppiyak-e House Bird Toy Mimiworld”, who’d brought the toy back with her on a trip from Korea.

The toy consists of a little bird, and a little bird house. The bird house has four activities for the chick. When the chick is placed over one of the play areas, a sound effect is played – the coolest of which was a washroom. You can kind of get the idea from the Mimi World Talkative Chick House Toy review on YouTube (skip to 7 minute mark).

In any case, this was inspiration for a project I thought would be fun for she and I to work on together. Although I knew this wouldn’t be slick, I thought the quickest and easiest way to do this would be:

1. Use a hall effect (magnet) sensor as a contactless sensor
2. Install a magnet in a stuffed toy (not suitable for small children!)
3. Take readings from the sensor with an Arduino
4. Interpret the readings and play a selection of sound effects on a PC

We took a shoebox, and she built a home for a small stuffed toy, a “Teany Ty” she named Jelly. I cut open the the stuffed toy, and installed a couple of magnets, and sewed it back up. I picked up some hall effect (magnet) sensors from Creatron, and wired it up to an Arduino nano, and installed the sensors in key areas of the home.

I wrote a few lines of Python to read the data from the Arduino, and play back the samples. I’d never used Python before, and had heard about the PyGame libraries for years – I thought it would be rock solid, but even within a minute of play, with my setup, I had issues with MP3 sound effects that others had encountered as well. I converted them to WAV files and that went away.

We had fun picking and recording samples, eating and slurping water into the microphone. Freesound was a great place to look for sounds, though it didn’t quite have the breadth that my daughter was looking for (“I want a recording of a tiger walking on dry leaves”).

The sensor/magnet combination I chose wasn’t quite sensitive enough – the tiny magnet in the stuffed toy had to be really close to the sensor to trigger the sound.  It does work, and it was a fun build.

Source Code: ProjectBird.zip

After lunch, the girls and I hopped on the subway and headed to the Canada Day events hosted at Queen’s Park.  We ended up having a  great time – there were free bouncy castles, live music, hula hoops, and more.

But I thought the coolest activity was the build and test your own air rocket, hosted by Makerkids.

The children were given pipe insulation for the rocket’s body, and duck tape, scissors, cardboard, streamers, and everything else you would need to complete an air rocket.

With occasional help from Rachel, Tegan built her rocket.

The Makerkids team had several launching stations setup on University Avenue, which appeared to be similar to the Make design.

As scotch tape was used for some of the cosmetic touches, I warned Tegan that the rocket may not survive its first test flight intact.  She decided to launch it anyway.

See the video for the test flight results.

Shortly after breakfast on July 1st, Tegan picked up a recently discarded brown cardboard box sitting beside our recycle bin.  She had a vision in mind: she wanted to build a rocket ship.  She needed some assistance – the cardboard box was too thick to cut with her scissors.  So she created a design.

First, I was assigned the window.  With a utility knife, I cut a circle out of the box. A clear plastic lid, also sourced from the recycle bin, was installed.  Tegan then made the fins from the box’s former flaps, and installed them using packing tape.

Next came the nose cone.  Rachel was a proponent of using the two remaining box flaps, and building an A-frame, triangular nose cone.  Tegan had her heart set on a true conical design, but couldn’t quite figure out how to achieve it with the materials at hand.  In the end, we taped 9 sheets of construction paper together, and rolled the now super-sized sheet into a cone, and installed it on the top of the rocket.

Together, the girls painted the rocket red.  To this day, it sits in a corner of their room.

When I go to the library with the kids, I end up coming across books I wouldn’t ordinarily see.  I recently stumbled on Robotics: DISCOVER THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE FUTURE in the kids section.

Although this book is targeted at older children, and my children aren’t particularly interested in robotics, we still had fun completing a couple of the simpler projects at home.

First, we built a mechanical hand with cardboard, drinking straws, string, and a glue gun.  This was a great craft, because my six year old could complete all the assembly steps (given guidance) and the completed project was unanticipated, functional and fun.

Next, we built a drawing robot, which consisted of a plastic cup, tape, an electric motor with an added weight (like a mobile phone or pager vibrator), batteries, and markers.  This craft required more assistance – I connected the batteries, and the weight to the motor.  My six year old assembled the cup and the markers, and shot video footage.

Here’s what the output looked like: