Our favorite game is Launchpad 23. The object is to assemble a rocket from pieces manufactured by a factory that manufactures random rocket parts.

The pyramids, made of hard plastic, are very pointy. I imagine you could poke one right through your hand if you slapped it hard enough. The danger factor enhances the enjoyment of this versatile game set.

IceDice $14

Here's Brian Egenriether's new-and-improved Skittles sorting machine. It's interesting to note that he used machinable epoxy for the parts instead of using a 3D printer. I know 3D printing is the future, but the current crop of home 3D printers make ugly parts. Subtractive fabrication technology makes better looking stuff, at least for now.

This machine sorts Skittles, m&m's and similar candies by color. It is the 3rd revision of the original machine. The inside is now complete and features user-selectable inputs to choose which type of candy to sort. Types not shown include Reese's Pieces and other types of Skittles.

The microcontroller is a BASIC Stamp 2 and the color sensor is made by TAOS. I made most of the parts by hand from a machinable epoxy including the outer case, inner housing, hopper mechanism, 5 way chute, and the the rotating disk inside. The other parts include a piece of PVC, ceramic bowls, telescope parts, wood for the base, and the funnel which was cut from a hummingbird feeder.

Automatic Sorting of Skittles or M&Ms by Colour (Thanks, D.S. Deboer!)

Last year I wrote about Remo Camerota's DevoBot project, an iOS application that lets you design DEVO-inspired robot art and play music using unreleased DEVO sounds. It's now available for $0.99 in the iTunes stores.

The title page of the book has a tiny image of a book and an illustration of a cricket:

The important thing
about a cricket is
that it is black.
It chirps,
it hops,
it jumps,
and sings all through the summer night.
But the important thing
about a cricket is
that it is black.

The other pages identify the important things about daisies, glass, water, shoes, spoons, and other common items, celebrating the mystery in the ordinary. Leonard Weisgard's color illustrations are rendered with a kind of quiet surrealism that increases the impact of Brown's writing.

The Important Book rekindles the sense of wonder we were born with.

The Important Book

Goldie Blox and The Spinning Machine is a game designed to encourage young girls to get into engineering. I gave my 6-year-old daughter a set for her birthday and she loves it!

Kids join Goldie via a series of short stories. They build, along side Goldie and her pals, the same machines she does! The machines largely spin characters around pirouette-style, and the designs are never complex! Its really engaging!

Building with Goldie's Blox is easy. There is a stable board where axles and posts slot in cleanly. Children wrap ribbon around them and use cranks to wind, tension and spin things. The stories are well written and very simply walk kids through the basics. The designs are easy to follow. I was really pleased with how well designed the whole game is. Engineers, go figure!

Finding engaging toys and games that expose my daughter to mechanical engineering, science and just how the world works is difficult. The first time she played with Goldie, my daughter built machines for 3 hours. I'd say this game does a good job.

I'm a big fan of Goldie Blox and The Spinning Machine.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/24/goldie-blox-and-the-spinning-m.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/19/rocket-robinson-a-graphic-adv.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/19/rocket-robinson-a-graphic-adv.html#comments Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:02:51 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=225421

I loved Jonny Quest when I was a kid, and I think my 10-year-old (and I) will love Rocket Robinson, a graphic novel by Sean O'Neill, which reminds me of the 1960s cartoon. Get a taste of it by reading the webcomic, and then chip in to Kickstarter if you dig it.

Rocket Robinson and the Pharaoh’s Fortune (or RRPF for short) is a classic adventure story set in Egypt in the 1930s, and follows the exploits of 12-year-old adventurer Rocket Robinson as he tries to unravel the mystery of a hidden, ancient treasure, located somewhere in the city of Cairo. For the last three years, the story has been available online as a webcomic, but unlike many other webcomics, this story was always envisioned as a book. It is a single, stand-alone story, and—although many comic fans around the world have been enjoying reading one page a week—it’s meant to be read cover-to-cover as a book.

The Rocket Robinson Graphic Novel

My 10-year-daughter Jane and I love Yodel-Oh!, an iOS target tapper game where you have to keep a Swiss mountain climber from falling off the edge of a cliff. The developer, Spinlight, just announced a spin-off, called Yodel-Oh! Math Mountain (iPad, iPhone) that adds the challenge of having to solve arithmetic problems.

The game is gorgeous, and one of the best things about it is that is free of the annoying crap that many iOS games are larded with: 3rd party add-ons, social network links, location tracking, and in-app purchases. Thanks, Spinlight!

Matthew Good is the creator of DragonBox+, "an educational puzzle game that also secretly teaches you how to do algebra."

The basic premise is that you must isolate the dragon on one side of the board in order for him to emerge. After each level the dragon will grow a little until he is finally full grown. The game gradually introduces new abilities that mimic algebraic concepts such as elimination, fractions, isolating variables and others without it being obvious.

We were recently at GDC to accept the award for Best Serious Game at the International Mobile Gaming Awards.

We have also seen parents post videos of their children playing the game. For example, a four year old boy solves the equation "e/e + x + (-1) = d" in this video.

DragonBox

Marble Season is the semiautobiographical novel by the acclaimed cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, author of the epic masterpiece Palomar and cocreator, with his brothers, Jaime and Mario, of the groundbreaking Love and Rockets comic book series. Marble Season is his first book with Drawn & Quarterly, and one of the most anticipated books of 2013. It tells the untold stories from the early years of these American comics legends, but also portrays the reality of life in a large family in suburban 1960s California. Pop-culture references—TV shows, comic books, and music—saturate this evocative story of a young family navigating cultural and neighborhood norms set against the golden age of the American dream and the silver age of comics.

Middle child Huey stages Captain America plays and treasures his older brother’s comic book collection almost as much as his approval. Marble Season subtly and deftly details how the innocent, joyfully creative play that children engage in (shooting marbles, backyard performances, and organizing treasure hunts) changes as they grow older and encounter name-calling naysayers, abusive bullies, and the value judgments of other kids. An all-ages story, Marble Season masterfully explores the redemptive and timeless power of storytelling and role play in childhood, making it a coming-of-age story that is as resonant with the children of today as with the children of the sixties.

Marble Season

This may seem like a strange way of doing things - to cut and then stick back together etc - but we went through a couple of versions of this before the toilet roll pieces survived - when you paint the toilet roll it tends to collapse go floppy. This was the best process we came up with.

After you have cut, taped and stuffed your toilet roll you are ready to:
- paint (allow to dry)
- apply a light layer of glue and then roll in glitter (allow to dry)
- seal on the glitter by applying a layer of gluey glaze (1 part glue to 2 parts water) (allow to dry)
- add some super hero gems/sparkles

Once all your paint, glitter and glue is dry remove the newspaper and painters tape from inside and round of the corners.

Paper Roll Craft: Super Hero Bracelets (via Craft)]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/17/howto-make-wonder-woman-bracel.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/16/fun-quadcopter-for-kids.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/16/fun-quadcopter-for-kids.html#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:49:15 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=224791

I bought Jane a $60 quadcopter from Banggood for her 10th birthday. One of the motor wires was broken on arrival so I had to solder it back on, and the battery charger was for a European power outlet so I broke it open and soldered on a US plug. Now it works and it's a lot of fun. It has a built in video camera, too!

It has two control modes. Mode 1 is the "beginner mode," which doesn't allow for tight turns. We like Mode 2, because it's actually easier to control. You can flip the captor 360 with the touch of a button on the transmitter, which Jane loves.

Here's a video of Jane flying it and me being paranoid that she's going to get it stuck in a tree. She ends up landing it in the street, and I say a naughty word.

Here is some delightful music for a Monday morning: "Music with Children: Playing the Recorder" by music educator Grace Nash (1909-1990) and friends. (via Toys and Techniques)

As I've said before, I've been a fan of Bob Staake's illustration ever since David and I stumbled across his ABC and 123 books at SF Moma in 1998. Bob's art is appealing in its simplicity, but it's also sophisticated and wry. No surprise that he has illustrated quite a few New Yorker covers. He does all of his illustration work using a pre-OS X version of the Macintosh operating system and Photoshop 3. He doesn't use a stylus, and instead does everything with a mouse.

It's with great pleasure that Boing Boing gets to premiere the trailer for Bob's new book, Bluebird. He's been working on it for 10 years, and it's a mind-blowing story aimed at 4-8 year olds. It's told without words, and it's about a boy, a bird, and some bullies. I don't want to spoil the story so I'll stop there. I agree with Kirkus Reviews assessment: "Like nothing you have seen before." Is it Bob's magnum opus? I'd say "yes.. so far." Who knows what he'll do next?

Bluebird

"Lindt Bunny Family," a photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by Paul J. "Leave them alone, and they multiply."]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/29/chocolate-bunny-family-photo.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/19/how-to-make-a-faucet-night-lig.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/19/how-to-make-a-faucet-night-lig.html#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:22:08 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=219702 Instructable user boston09 shows how to make a faucet night light.

Here's Tavi Gevison, creator of the amazing Style Rookie site, the Rookie zine and the indispensable Rookie: Year One collection, doing a must-see TedXTeens talk about creating strong female characters and role-models, being a teen feminist, and figuring out how to grow up to be a strong, self-confident woman. This is one I'm putting in the "show to my daughter in a couple years" file.

Rookie: Yearbook One - Sassy's second coming (via The Mary Sue) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/19/tavi-style-rookie-gevison.html/feed 49 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/14/rock-band-lands-the-truth.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/14/rock-band-lands-the-truth.html#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:38:30 +0000 David Pescovitz http://boingboing.net/?p=218790

San Francisco's Rock Band Land is a "creativity school" in San Francisco where kids aged 4-8 write song stories together, rock out on high-quality child-sized instruments, record their collaborative creations, and ultimately perform on stage at a local club, complete with fog machines, lights, and, yes, a disco ball. Directed by notable indie rockers Brian Gorman of Tartufi and Marcus Stoesz of The Music Wrong, Rock Band Land is an inspiring DIY scene of unbridled creativity and controlled chaos where pint-sized punks reveal the weird and true future of rock and roll. My son is a multi-year Rock Band Land veteran. Not only has he made dear friends there, but so have his parents.

Now, Brian and Marcus have expanded the Rock Band Land vision into the video realm. "The Truth About Polar Bears" was inspired by ideas that bubbled up in Rock Band Land classes. If all goes well, this surreal story is just a teaser for (thunder drumroll)... Rock Band Land TV! Good luck, Brian and Marcus! For more on Rock Band Land, check out The Bold Italic's mini-documentary below and, of course, the Rock Band Land site.

The entirety of the wonderful 1972 Tales from Muppetland special Muppet Musicians of Bremen is on YouTube is six parts. I loved this one growing up, and can't wait to share it with my daughter. It's not out on DVD, though you can find old laserdiscs of it if you hunt around.

Muppet Musicians of Bremen ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/11/muppet-musicians-of-bremen.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/07/videos-from-diy-org-a-kids.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/07/videos-from-diy-org-a-kids.html#comments Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:53:26 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=217358

DIY.org is a site and app that encourages kids to make things. It also lets them share their projects and earn achievement badges. They've just released a few new videos that show some of the kids who are on the site.

Field Trip, your guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you is now on the iPhone! Field Trip runs in the background on your phone. When you get close to something interesting, it will notify you and if you have a headset or bluetooth connected, it can even read the info to you.

Field Trip can help you learn about everything from local history to the latest and best places to shop, eat, and have fun. You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically, as you walk next to those places.

Field Trip for iOS (Via iDownLoadBlog)

After the jump, an excerpt from Free to Learn.

Our children spend their days being passively instructed, and made to sit still and take tests -- often against their will. We call this imprisonment schooling, yet wonder why kids become bored and misbehave. Even outside of school children today seldom play and explore without adult supervision, and are afforded few opportunities to control their own lives. The result: anxious, unfocused children who see schooling—and life—as a series of hoops to struggle through.

In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that our children, if free to pursue their own interests through play, will not only learn all they need to know, but will do so with energy and passion. Children come into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.

Excerpt from Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, by Peter Gray

"GO TO HELL."

The words hit me hard. I had on occasion been damned to hell before, but never so seriously. A colleague, frustrated by my thickheaded lack of agreement with an obvious truth, or a friend, responding to some idiotic thing I had said. But in those cases "go to hell" was just a way to break the tension, to end an argument that was going nowhere. This time it was serious. This time I felt, maybe, I really would go to hell. Not the afterlife hell of fire and brimstone, which I don't believe in, but the hell that can accompany life in this world when you are burned by the knowledge that you have failed someone you love, who needs you, who depends on you.

The words were spoken by my nine-year-old son, Scott, in the principal's office of the public elementary school. They were addressed not only to me but to all seven of us big, smart adults who were lined up against him -- the principal, Scott's two classroom teachers, the school's guidance counselor, a child psychologist who worked for the school system, his mother (my late wife), and me. We were there to present a united front, to tell Scott in no uncertain terms that he must attend school and must do there whatever he was told by his teachers to do. We each sternly said our piece, and then Scott, looking squarely at us all, said the words that stopped me in my tracks.

I immediately began to cry. I knew at that instant that I had to be on Scott's side, not against him. I looked through my tears to my wife and saw that she, too, was crying, and through her tears I could see that she was thinking and feeling exactly as I was. We both knew then that we had to do what Scott had long wanted us to do -- remove him not just from that school but from anything that was anything like that school. To him, school was prison, and he had done nothing to deserve imprisonment.

That meeting in the principal's office was the culmination of years of meetings and conferences at the school, at which my wife and I would hear the latest accounts of our son's misbehavior. His misbehavior was particularly disturbing to the school personnel because it was not the usual kind of naughtiness that teachers have come to expect from exuberant boys confined against their will. It was more like planned rebellion. He would systematically and deliberately behave in ways contrary to the teachers' directions. When the teacher instructed students to solve arithmetic problems in a particular way, he would invent a different way to solve them. When it came time to learn about punctuation and capital letters, he would write like the poet e.e. cummings, putting capitals and punctuation wherever he wanted to or not using them at all. When an assignment seemed pointless to him, he would say so and refuse to do it. Sometimes -- and this had become increasingly frequent -- he would, without permission, leave the classroom and, if not forcibly restrained, walk home.

We eventually found a school for Scott that worked. A school as unlike "school" as you can imagine. A little later I will tell you about it and the worldwide educational movement it has inspired. But this book is not primarily about a particular school. It is about the human nature of education.

Children come into the world burning to learn and genetically programmed with extraordinary capacities for learning. They are little learning machines. Within their first four years or so they absorb an unfathomable amount of information and skills without any instruction. They learn to walk, run, jump, and climb. They learn to understand and speak the language of the culture into which they are born, and with that they learn to assert their will, argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, and ask questions. They acquire an incredible amount of knowledge about the physical and social world around them. All of this is driven by their inborn instincts and drives, their innate playfulness and curiosity. Nature does not turn off this enormous desire and capacity to learn when children turn five or six. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of school is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.

My son's words in the principal's office changed the direction of my professional life as well as my personal life. I am, and was then, a professor of biopsychology, a researcher interested in the biological foundations of mammalian drives and emotions. I had been studying the roles of certain hormones in modulating fear in rats and mice, and I had recently begun looking into the brain mechanisms of maternal behavior in rats. That day in the principal's office triggered a series of events that gradually changed the focus of my research. I began to study education from a biological perspective. At first my study was motivated primarily by concern for my son. I wanted to make sure we weren't making a mistake by allowing him to follow his own educational path rather than a path dictated by professionals. But gradually, as I became convinced that Scott's self-directed education was going beautifully, my interest turned to children in general and to the human biological underpinnings of education.

What is it about our species that makes us the cultural animal? In other words, what aspects of human nature cause each new generation of human beings, everywhere, to acquire and build upon the skills, knowledge, beliefs, theories, and values of the previous generation? This question led me to examine education in settings outside of the standard school system, for example, at the remarkable non-school my son was attending. Later I looked into the growing, worldwide "unschooling" movement to understand how the children in those families become educated. I read the anthropological literature and surveyed anthropologists to learn everything I could about children's lives and learning in hunter-gatherer cultures -- the kinds of cultures that characterized our species for 99 percent of our evolutionary history. I reviewed the entire body of psychological and anthropological research on children's play, and my students and I conducted new research aimed at understanding how children learn through play.

Such work led me to understand how children's strong drives to play and explore serve the function of education, not only in hunter gatherer cultures but in our culture as well. It led to new insights concerning the environmental conditions that optimize children's abilities to educate themselves through their own playful means. It led me to see how, if we had the will, we could free children from coercive schooling and provide learning centers that would maximize their ability to educate themselves without depriving them of the rightful joys of childhood.

This book is about all of that.

(Via Brian Upton at G+BB)

One of the biggest charmers at TED2013 so far has been Romo the Robot, who rolled and whizzed around the stage with one of his creators, Keller Rinaudo. With large bubbly eyes, four fang-like teeth, and a happy alien voice, it's easy to forget that this animated robot is actually just an iPhone mounted on a rolling platform.

"We wanted to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or eighty," Rinaudo told the audience. So he and his two friends - Peter Sodd and Phu Nguyen - all from Phoenix, created Romo, who you can control from an iPad, computer, or another iPhone after downloading its free app. The three twenty-somethings then started their company, Romotive, where you can purchase Romo for $150. I spoke to them after the talk.

What's the purpose of Romo?

Rinaudo: He's just a robot that anyone can program and hack. He's also just fun to play with. You can invite anyone to control Romo from anywhere in the world. We think of him as a robot, but a lot of people buy him for kids, especially because when kids create behaviors for him and they try to train Robo how to do things, they are actually learning about computer science. It's a really cool way to get kids excited about technology and robotics and coding.

How did you create your first prototype?

Peter Sodd: He [pointing to Nguyen] called me on the phone and said, "What if we could build robots that used smart phones as their brain?" Two weeks later I built the first prototype, and it worked.

Rinaudo: We built 100 of them by hand - at first. Then we built 2,000 of them.

By hand?

RK: Yes. Now we're building 2000 of them per week. But not by hand.

What can you do besides hit the [touch-screen] joystick and make him move around?

Romo has a bunch of autonomous behaviors, which means he can interact with his environment, he can track you, and he can also use computer vision not only to track your face but also to recognize different glyphs. Something we're working on is the ability to hold different glyphs in front of Romo - we call it Romo glyphs - and what that allows people to do is program him. Romo knows that each card means something different and by holding cards in front of him you can create a program. And by changing the order of those cards and holding them in front of him again you can change the program. So that's our attempt to make programming accessible to kids who are even just six or seven years old - make it tangible, make it easy, and make it interactive with a robot that is actually going to show kids what they are creating in real time.

Is your primary audience kids?

We built Romo for 12-year-old versions of ourselves because we thought that advanced robotics shouldn't only be in research labs and factories - we wanted to figure out a way to get those robots into homes. It's in much the same way the first personal computers were called toys, and they appealed to kids and hackers who were sitting on the floors of their garages hacking on these things, getting them to do cool stuff. Same thing with Romo. But we don't think about whether the robots are for kids or adults. We build robots we think are awesome and that appeal to all ages of people.

See all TED2013 coverage

Quarterly.co is a subscription service for wonderful things. People can subscribe to a curator (such as Joel Johnson, Veronica Belmont, Tim Ferriss, Joshua Foer, Gretchen Rubin and others) and pay $25 per quarter to receive a box of items selected by the curator.

I'm a curator and my most recent mailing includes things to stimulate your sense of vision: a length of EL wire, a tiny microscope, and a black light flashlight. Take a look at what people are saying about my latest mailing on Twitter.

Mark's Quarterly subscription

Previously:

Quarterly Co. interviews Mark

Sneak peek at my Quarterly.co package of Fantastic Plastic gadgets and novelties

"My experiences with violence in schools still echo throughout my life but standing to face the problem has helped me in immeasurable ways," says Shane. "Schools and families are in desperate need of proper tools to confront this problem. This piece is a starting point."

More here.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/22/to-this-day-a-video-manifesto.html/feed 28 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/22/one-baby-band.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/22/one-baby-band.html#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:43:55 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=214798

One of the school projects that caught my eye was a popsicle stick-encased stereo amplifier with speakers built from used CD cases. Ian has to pay for supplies–popsicle sticks and the CD cases make for low-cost building materials.

One of his students wanted a cheap stereo to take to college, so he designed one for easy construction, affordability, and cool design. It’s all of that. The project is built around a $33 8-watt amp. Blue LEDs give it a cool glow at night. Ian had four students without prior electronics experience build their own and he said they did so with ease.

Schematic at MAKE online