Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction

  MAKE YOUR OWN GEEKY GAMES AND CRAFTS

  Make Your Own Cartoons

  The Coolest Homemade Coloring Books

  Create the Ultimate Board Game

  Electronic Origami

  Cyborg Jack-o’-Lanterns and Other Holiday Decorations for Every Geeky Household

  Windup Toy Finger Painting

  Create a Superhero ABC Book

  Model Building with Cake

  Pirate Cartography

  Parenting with Role-Playing Games

  A Never-Ending Demolition Derby

  GEEKY ACTIVITIES FOR THE GREAT OUTDOORS

  See the World from the Sky

  Best Slip ’N Slide Ever

  Fireflies for Every Season

  Video Games That Come to Life

  Fly a Kite at Night

  Build an Outdoor Movie Theater

  The “Magic” Swing

  AWESOME ACCESSORIES

  Smart Cuff Links

  Light-up Duct Tape Wallet

  Crocheted Dice Bag of Holding

  GEEKY KIDS GO GREEN

  The Science of Composting

  Home Hydroponics

  BUILD/LEARN/ GEEK

  Build a Binary Calendar

  Portable Electronic Flash Cards

  Wi-Fi Signal Booster

  Cool LEGO Lighting from Repurposed Parts

  GEEKY POTPOURRI

  Ice Cubes Fit for a Geek

  Exploding Drink Practical Joke

  Afterword

  Appendix A - Resources and References by Chapter

  Appendix B - RPG Character Sheet

  Appendix C - Projects Listed by Rank

  GOTHAM BOOKS

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, May 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Ken Denmead Foreword copyright © 2010 by Chris Anderson

  All rights reserved

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-40431-7

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  To my amazing wife, Robin, who has seen fit to encourage and enable my geeky traits while helping make me the best father I could ever hope to be. This book would not exist without your love and partnership, and I would not be the happy GeekDad I am. I love you!

  To my boys, Eli and Quinn, who are enough like me that I can share much of the stuff I geek-out over with you, but are different enough from me that you show me new things every day. You are the reasons I did this. Grow up strong and geeky!

  And to my parents, Ellen and Walter: I don’t imagine the path I’ve traveled has been quite the one you expected, but I figure you’re pretty happy with where I’ve ended up. Thank you so much for starting me out on that path with such good preparation and support, and for being there for me every step of the way.

  Special Thanks

  Three years ago, a man, of whose fame and shrewd intelligence I was only then vaguely aware, put out a call for volunteers to write for a blog called GeekDad. I took what I thought was an outside shot, and was lucky enough to be accepted by Chris Anderson to contribute.

  Six months later, he asked me to take over running the blog, and once I’d scraped my jaw off the floor, I enthusiastically accepted.

  The time since then has been an adventure, and a tectonic shift in the direction of my life. I am living a life I could barely have imagined and have been lucky enough to pay the favor forward to other geeky parents who have come to write for GeekDad, too. But it all started with the entrepreneurial generosity of Chris Anderson, the founder of GeekDad, to whom I am eternally grateful.

  A whole new world

  Of critical import in the whole “I got to write a book” process is being given the chance. Very special thanks go to Megan Thompson at LJK Literary for “discovering” me and nursing me through the proposal process, and Jud Laghi for getting my proposal looked at by all the right people.

  And “all the right people” would be my editor, Lucia Watson, who helped me take a bucketful of cool ideas and present it in the (hopefully) fun and readable tome you now hold, and assistant editor Miriam Rich who has guided me through the strange new world of publishing.

  I realize I’ve been very lucky to have fallen in with such patient and professional people, and I can’t express my gratitude for how much they’ve done for me deeply enough. Thanks!

  And there’s no way I’m leaving them out

  The real success of the GeekDad blog comes from its family of writers, and I can’t take credit for this book without giving some back to the team that helped make it all work: Anton Olsen, Brad Moon, Chuck Lawton, Corrina Lawson, Curtis Silver, Daniel Donahoo, Dave Banks, Don Shump, Doug Cornelius, Jason B. Jones, Jenny Williams, John Baichtal, John Booth, Jonathan Liu, Kathy Ceceri, Lonnie Morgan, Matt Blum, Michael Harrison, Moses Milazzo, Natania Barron, Paul Govan, Russ Neumeier, Todd Dailey, Vincent Janoski, and the Mystical Magical “Z.”

  Additional thanks go to Matt Blum, my right hand at running the blog, for his help copyediting the manuscript, and Bill Moore, Dave Banks, Russ Neumeier, Andrew Kardon, Brian Little, and Natania Barron for contributing projects to this book.

  And thanks to the crew of Starbase Phoenix: On the edges of known space, a fire burns to light the way. You guy
s are that fire.

  Foreword

  by Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired

  Here’s the challenge of being a GeekDad. You’re a geek. You’re also a dad. Geeks want to do cool projects, ideally involving science, technology, and anything that comes from Japan. Dads, meanwhile, want to spend time with their kids, ideally doing something kids want to do. Most of the time, these two forces are in opposition. But they don’t have to be!

  The origins of this book, and the Web site that inspired it, were in finding ways to reconcile the call of the geek with the nature of the parent. In early 2007, I started GeekDad mostly for myself: I had four (now five) kids, all under ten at the time, and just could not bear the thought of playing Candyland one more time.

  I was looking for projects and activities that were both fun for them and fun for me. Not fun for me and boring for them (most of my geeky stuff) or fun for them but boring for me (most kid stuff), but fun for both of us. In other words, a worthy challenge for all ages.

  I hoped that there were other people out there with the same ambition who might respond to my posts. There were. Today, a couple years after the site launched, it attracts more than a million readers per month and has more than two dozen contributors. Led by Ken Denmead, who has run the site since late 2007, GeekDad. com, now an official Wired blog, has become one of the top parenting sites on the Web. It turns out that the nexus of geekdom and parenting is a rich seam indeed. Now Ken has taken it to the ultimate degree: the book you’re reading. If only such a thing had existed three years ago when I needed it!

  My own quest for the perfect Geek/Dad intersection began with LEGO Mindstorms robotics. About three years ago, my boys (then nine and six) were hugely into LEGO, while I was getting into robotics. I’d also been given an RC plane, which the boys and I had tried relatively unsuccessfully to fly. We’d also been given a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit and had dutifully made all the robots in the instruction manual and left thinking “what next?”

  It was clear we were never going to be incredibly good at either LEGO Mindstorms or RC planes, given all the amazing things people could do with both, as evidenced by the videos we looked up on YouTube. And frankly, as a geek, I couldn’t see the point in doing stuff that other people had already done a lot better than we could.

  But while out on a run, I got an idea. The sensors available for Mindstorms were pretty cool, including gyros, an electronic compass, and accelerometers. NXT also had a Bluetooth and was compatible with other Bluetooth devices, possibly including Bluetooth GPS modules.

  What do you get when you put that all together—gyros, accelerometers, GPS, and a computer? An autopilot! If we couldn’t fly the RC planes well, maybe we could invent a robot that could. And for all the cool things that people had done with Mindstorms, the one thing nobody had done yet was to make it fly. A worthy project had arrived! We would design the world’s first LEGO Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)—a fully autonomous LEGO-piloted drone.

  We started with the mechanical bits. At the time, there was no way to drive RC servos directly from Mindstorms, so we designed a sliding tray with a Mindstorms motor that slid it back and forth, and mounted the plane’s rudder servo on that. This way you’d always have RC control, but the Mindstorms controller could override it by sliding the whole servo forward and back. Likewise for turning the autopilot on and off. In the absence of an electronic link between the RC and Mindstorms worlds, we settled for a mechanical one: a servo strapped to a Mindstorms touch sensor.

  Then it was time for the software. My son and I had worked on the code all weekend. It had turned out to be a perfect father-kid project: fun for him and fun for me—a meeting of child and grown-up interests turned into a fantastic weekend activity. We started with the simplest autopilot, which would use the compass sensor and just fly in a given direction for a preprogrammed length of time, then switch to another direction for another duration. That’s just the navigation part of an autopilot, however; the stabilization part would have to be covered by a commercial stabilization unit called the FMA Co-Pilot.

  One flight revealed that it actually worked (more or less)—the plane navigated on its own and stayed in level flight throughout. We posted online about the project and got a huge amount of interest; the idea of a LEGO UAV was just as mind-blowing as we’d hoped. But real aerial autonomy goes a lot further than we had taken it so far: It should include latitude and longitude waypoints, and a proper autopilot should handle both navigation and stabilization. On to version 2.

  This one was much more advanced. By now, thankfully, HiTechnic, a company that develops Mindstorms sensors, had gotten in touch and offered us a prototype of a device that not only allowed Mindstorms to drive RC servos directly, but also handle the autopilot on/off switching from the RC system. Others, led by Steve Hassenplug, an amateur Mindstorms guru, had figured out how to interface Bluetooth GPS modules with Mindstorms, so it was now able to use standard latitude and longitude waypoints. And HiTechnic had also made a prototype “integrating gyro” that simplified the math of working with such inertial sensors.

  Combining all of those with HiTechnic’s three-axis accelerometer made the basics of a real Inertial Measurement Unit, the core of the most sophisticated autopilots in the world. But with a LEGO Mindstorms controller at the core! We mounted it in a plane, did a heap of programming, and more or less proved that it could work.

  The LEGO UAV 2 flew a few times to prove the concept, then retired to a career of trade shows and the LEGO Museum in Billund, Denmark, where it is today. The kids, sadly, left the project before it was finished. By the time the code had switched to Robot C and the soldering iron had come out, we were well beyond any conceivable Geek/Dad balance. But the seed had been planted—and this was fertile soil.

  The search for similar geeky projects that cut across generational appeal led me to start GeekDad. My jokey early motto was “Permission to play with cool toys isn’t the only reason to have kids, but it’s up there.” The point was to focus on the Venn intersection of geeky interests and parenting: to find cool science/tech/culture things that are fun for all generations.

  I bought the domain for not much from a nice guy who wasn’t using it, and then started blogging intermittently. Then I invited friends to join me, and soon put out an open call for other geeky dads to participate.

  The rest, as they say, is history. This book is what I could only dream of three years ago. My kids and I will happily dip in on weekends, picking projects that fit the time and materials we have at hand. You should do the same. It’s not meant to be read front to back. It’s a book of ideas and instructions. Skim, share with your kids, and find something that sounds like just the thing to fill a Saturday afternoon.

  When you’re done, you will have had an adventure, that’s sure. But you may have also triggered a curiosity in your child that could lead to a lifetime fascination. You had such a moment when you were a kid; that’s what made you a geek at heart. This book is about opportunities to create such a moment. And to be a great parent while doing it.

  Have fun!

  Introduction

  About Being a Geek and a Dad

  Once upon a time, the word geek was used to describe circus performers. Then it evolved as a pejorative to describe awkward, skinny kids who got routinely thrown into school lockers by the high school football team. But these days, geek has reinvented itself. This is the era of the geek. And geeks are cool.

  There is some interchangeability between geek and nerd. They both generally describe someone of restricted social ability who finds enjoyment in pursuits outside the mainstream—pursuits like computers, role-playing games (RPGs), science fiction and fantasy literature and movies, science and engineering, and so on—you get the idea. But there is a key difference between the geek and the nerd.

  One renowned geek dad (and honorary GeekDad), Wil Wheaton, describes it pretty simply: A geek is a self-aware nerd. It makes a lot of sense to me—I think geeks had those social issues gro
wing up and liked all those things that weren’t part of the popular culture in school, but we came to understand our nature and, in a very Kübler-Ross kind of way, moved past the self-limiting aspects of nerdhood to a state of acceptance, and even enjoyment, of our place in the universe. Which, in a funny way, helped us take care of some of those social issues, because a lot of us ended up actually getting married and having kids (which totally rocks!).

  I think part of the current ascendancy of geeks in general, and GeekDads specifically, is that there are a lot more geeky women than people realize, and some of us geeky guys were smart enough to recognize our own kind and attempt to mate and perpetuate the subspecies.

  But before I get too far along, let me point out something important: Geeks aren’t just about the computers and the D&D and the passion for anime and comic books. There’s a whole lot more out there that people get passionate about, even mildly obsessive about, that can qualify them as geeks. If you’re so passionate about something that you’re not just good at it but can lose yourself doing it for long periods of time (often to your social detriment), you may be a geek. If you carry encyclopedic knowledge about a topic and will joyfully use it to act as the pedant whenever the subject is being discussed, you may be a geek. If you have a room in your house devoted to a hobby that other family members avoid talking about, you may indeed be a geek. I’m not talking about “experts” or “professionals”—I’m talking about the real deal. Here are some examples: