Our first self-made mask out of papier-mâché had initially been met with a certain dose of skepticism by child #1. Wasn’t the mask–it was Halloween–funny rather than scary? Wouldn’t a “self-bought” rather than self-made mask have been cooler? Would he be made fun of? But the god of makers had mercy…
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If you consider yourself a movie geek but have no idea why Google’s UK landing page says “Hello to Jason Isaacs,” then it is time to subscribe to the BBC’s ‘Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review’ podcast.
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On Monday June 19th, the jury of the German “Spiel des Jahres” (“Game of the Year”) prize announces its choice for Children’s Game of the Year 2017. Waiting for the jury’s verdict, I had a closer look at the nominations and recommendations.
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From a year as exchange high school student to the USA in 1989/90, I had brought back several “discoveries” of cartoons to Germany. The most outlandish of these, from a German perspective (and maybe not only from a German perspective), certainly was ‘Bloom County. ‘
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For his birthday, my son wanted to tinker together with his friends So we decided to have a “robot tinker party” and build some bristlebots together.
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Text adventures are commercially dead… or are they? A quarter of a century after game companies stopped making text adventures, Bob Bates of Infocom fame is crowdfunding his game “Thaumistry: in charm’s way.”
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It is a little known fact that Isaac Newton, after creating the foundations of classical mechanics, went on to codify the principles of magic that until today serve as basis for wizards around the world, good and evil alike.
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An increasingly popular web comic about a young witch called Pepper and her tomcat Carrot is developed as “open-source comic.” Open source in the arts?!?
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Thanks to ‘Humble Bundle,’ now I actually go through the ‘Make:’ books’ contents, reading up on all the fascinating project ideas.
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My son likes making and tinkering, and so do several of his friends. So we decided to have a “Tinker Birthday Party. Our project? A small alarm system!
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HABA is well-known for its line of games for younger children, easily recognizable by the distinctive bright-yellow boxes.
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A while ago, I received a graphic tablet as present and immediately started playing around with it. As a big fan of Open Source software, I turned to ‘GIMP’ rather than ‘Photoshop.’ When looking around on the internet for tips and tricks about working with the graphic tablet, I soon stumbled over ‘Krita,’ another Open Source project, which has gained momentum lately.
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Last week, the jury of the German Spiel des Jahres (“game of the year”) prize announced their choice of best Children’s Game of 2016. Out of the three nominated games, the jury picked Marco Teubner’s ‘My First Stonge Age’ as their favorite. Thanks to our local library, which is always quick in buying nominated games, my family had the chance to find out, whether ‘My First Stone Age’ will also turn out to be one of our favorites.
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This Monday, the German “Spiel des Jahres” jury announced this year’s nominations for game of the year. Of course, GeekDad readers were already well aware of some of the nominated games!
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My kids share my love for comics, and they are experts on all things Batman, with special attention for the various supervillains. So when we decided to draw a comic together, Batman was a natural choice.
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The German Spiel des Jahres is sometimes called the Oscars of board games. I find myself revisiting some of my favorites from the early years of the awards. Two of these classics, “Hare & Tortoise” and “Enchanted Forest”, completely reinvented the old-fashioned dice-driven racing game.
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Some time ago, I discovered a new type of playground, on which two dozen distributed light-changing buzzers controlled two physical entities very dear to my heart: my kids.
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Your kid punches you such that you stumble backwards and break through a door, then draws a gun and takes careful aim, all the time greedily eying the purse you dropped … oh well, once again, things did not quite work out as you had planned for this round of Colt Express.
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Recently, at the Christmas party at work, talk turned to our first computers, and from there to the computer games we played back then. “Ah,” says one, “‘Defender of the Crown’ on my Amiga, that was something.” “‘Monkey Island,'” says another. “Those Infocom games,” says I. As we continue reminiscing, I realize that none of my colleagues is aware of ‘The Digital Antiquarian,’ who during the past years has thoroughly researched these and many more computer game classics.
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You probably know about Scratch, the graphical programming environment developed at MIT that allows kids to code interactive stories, games, and animations. Researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria have been working hard at creating Pocket Code, a Scratch-like environment for the Android platform.
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Building our own robots has been a topic in our house for a long time now: the kids are absolutely fascinated with robots and regularly fantasize about building robots for either doing the chores around the house or producing candy and toys.
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Fall has brought a fresh harvest of interactive fiction. The annual IFComp (Interactive Fiction Competition) offers 54 games (parser-based as well as hypertext-based) for your consideration, many of them ready to play directly in your browser. If, on the other hand, you are more into chose-your-own-adventure books, there is the 2015 Windhammer Prize for short game-book fiction, offering 16 PDFs for download.
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Which boy has not dreamed about discovering a pharaoh’s burial chamber, the mummy encased in a richly decorated sarcophagus and surrounded by unimaginable treasure, untouched by grave robbers? So far, the dream has only come true once. A recent discovery suggests that we can start dreaming again.
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Summer has arrived and, in due course, my kids have taken up collecting popsicle sticks again.
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Recently, my kids were delighted to meet Darth Vader in downtown Munich.
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Recently, I find myself again and again in discussions with my children that get started with one of them asking “Daddy, how long until we can watch this movie?”
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In many regions of Bavaria, Germany, it is customary for towns and villages to raise a “maypole” every five years on the First of May. It is a perfect day for a family outing to the next village in which a maypole is raised that particular year. This May 1st, however, it had been raining nonstop from morning ’til evening…
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Our first self-made mask out of papier-mâché had initially been met with a certain dose of skepticism by child #1. Wasn’t the mask–it was Halloween–funny rather than scary? Wouldn’t a “self-bought” rather than self-made mask have been cooler? Would he be made fun of? But the god of makers had mercy…
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It was with a bit of trepidation that I observed my kid’s first brushes with orthography in grammar school. When it became apparent that something had to be done in the way of regular spelling exercises, my first thought was daily dictations, such as I had been subjected to by my parents. I had hated them (the dictations, not the parents), but spelling could never be fun, it seemed.
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