(upbeat music)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this session of Makerspaces for Creative Learning. Tonight, we are all about classic board games and how you can use them as inspiration for some really fun and exciting projects that you can do in your makerspace, classroom, summer camp, or whatever setting you choose.

We are going to dive right in, and I'm going to show you examples for VEX 123, VEX GO, and VEX IQ. On our agenda tonight is to do two board game-inspired activities for VEX 123. One of them is with the game Candy Land, and the other is with Chutes and Ladders. Then, we're going to do a coordinate grid activity, Battle Boat Bonanza, with VEX GO from a VEX GO STEM lab. Finally, we'll do a little bit of engineering in our Mouse Trap-inspired game with VEX IQ.

You might be wondering why I chose board games. I think, especially with these classic board games, they're games that almost everybody knows, and they can really get kids of all levels engaged and excited. Board games are both competitive and collaborative. You'll see with these maker ideas for the board games, they all offer opportunities for a great deal of collaboration in making the game, figuring out how you want to play the game, and setting up the game. They're really great projects for collaboration.

They're versatile, so you can make a super simple version of any of these activities, or you can carry this project on for as long as you want to, making it more complex, getting more people involved, and making it bigger. There are many different ways to make it really complex or really easy, so it should fit a lot of different environments.

With board games, there's so much that you can learn from using them. I'm sure most of you use board games in some form or another in your classroom. You can incorporate art, design, literacy, and numeracy. There are a lot of cross-curricular connections with these particular maker projects that can make them rich in learning opportunities as well as just being fun. It's really easy to adapt them for different age groups, and you can change the theme of all these games in various ways. We're going to explore that a little bit as well.

All right, let's get started on some of these project ideas. The first one is for VEX 123, and it is based on the game Candy Land. Probably everybody knows this game; it's the game with a candy theme where you start at the beginning, draw cards, go to colored spaces, and try to make it to the end where you get to King Candy, the king of Candy Land. There are different characters and candy-themed places along the way. This game is great for kids who cannot read at all because there isn't any necessary reading involved. It's a perfect game for really young students, like five-year-olds.

Incidentally, when I was doing a little bit of research, I found that there are so many different varieties or variations of the Candy Land board game layout and appearance. I was curious about how old this game is, and I discovered that the first Candy Land game came out in 1949, which is a long time ago. There are many different variations of it, and the one I'm looking at now is not the one I remember from my childhood. It's interesting to see how it has evolved.

I have here my VEX 123 Candy Land game that I made. You can see I made it with VEX 123 tiles. I created a little process for doing this because I think if you're doing this with kids, it would be a great opportunity to collaborate and come up with a different theme for it, like a different land other than Candy Land.

Thank you for joining this session of Makerspaces for Creative Learning. I hope you found these ideas inspiring and that you'll be able to implement them in your own educational settings. Have fun creating and exploring with your students!

'Cause you don't want to just replicate what already exists. You want kids to be thinking about how they can make it their own and come up with their own ideas to make a very similar game. So the game is inspiration, but you're not duplicating the game.

What I did was imagine that if I was teaching this, I would first brainstorm ideas for what land it was going to be. It doesn't have to be Candy Land. I was thinking about different lands that kids might be interested in; it could be dinosaur land, reptile land, underwater land, magic land, or whatever crazy thing that kids want to do. You could decide whether you wanted kids to work in small groups or if you were doing a big group activity where everybody did a part of it. That would work really well with this particular activity, as you'll see, because there are a lot of different parts you can do, and you can make it as big or as small as you want to.

First, I would brainstorm these ideas with everybody and then come to a consensus about which one you're going to choose. I just did Summerland because I was thinking about the end of the school year and how, when I was teaching, I would eagerly anticipate the summer, as I'm sure many of you are doing right now, or maybe you're already out of school.

I thought about what kinds of characters and places could be in Summerland because the Candy Land board has characters and places. I came up with Firecracker Forest as one of my places. I just drew some little firecrackers to be my Firecracker Forest. All I did was just do this on card stock with markers. Of course, in your makerspace, you might have all kinds of different materials, and you can really get creative with them. It would be really fun to use little LEDs and batteries to light it up, but my example is just basically drawn.

So I have my Fireworks Forest here. They're not exactly in the right place on the board, but just so you could see them. Right here, I have a character, and this guy is Percy Popsicle because popsicles are a really important part of summer, as far as I'm concerned. I actually attached a standoff, this is an IQ standoff, to the back of him, and then I'm just sticking it in the holes in the top of the 123 walls to anchor it. So that's one way to do it here. I'll put it here so you can see where it is a little bit better. I'll give you a front view too.

I also did Blissful Beach as one of my things. I drew a little beach and set that up. Instead of having to get to King Candy and the king of Candy Land, I did it to get to summer camp. So it's like welcome to Camp 123. That's the goal of the game. Here's my starting point, and here's my ending point.

You need cards for a Candy Land game because the kids draw a card to know where to go on the board. If they draw a blue card, they go to a blue square. That's what makes it so great for kids that can't read yet because there's nothing to read on the card. It's just go to blue, right? So that's easy. I just use index cards for that, super simple. Then I drew my path and used arrows to indicate the direction I wanted them to travel on the 123 board because that was much easier than drawing lines.

Incidentally, I know we talk about how you can use dry erase markers on 123 tiles, but someone recently clued us into the fact that you can use a wet erase, like a Vis-a-Vis pen, like those used for overhead projectors, or at least people used to use for overhead projectors. They work really great on here; they've got bright colors. They don't come off as easily, like they're not going to wipe off on your hand, but they do come off easily at the end when you're done using them with a little tiny bit of water. You can just wipe this board off, and you're done. So that kind of opens up a bunch of new fun possibilities. I wanted to tell everybody about that little trick.

So that's what I did here. I drew my little pattern on here with my Vis-a-Vis markers. I added the little, in Candy Land, there's like little jump-ahead places. If you land on the Fireworks Forest square, then you can jump ahead to where the Fireworks Forest is. So I put those on there. And that's it, super simple. You know, if you were doing it with kids, you could give kids different jobs, or each kid can invent a place, each kid can invent a character. You could have somebody's job to draw on the board. It's up to you depending on the level of your kids and how much they are ready for.

And so then you're going to code the 123 to take your turn, right? So your 123 is going to be like your pawn in the game. If there are two kids playing, they're going to need two different 123's, ideally of a different color. But of course, you can use the art ring if you want to personalize your 123 in some way. I'm going to show you an example of that in just a minute. But anyway, it doesn't matter whether you want to do touch coding, coder, or VEXcode. All of those things will work with this game. So again, it's totally customizable to the level of your kids.

Yeah, so the one thing to remember is, let's say I drew this blue card, and I'm going to be, it's on the starting square, which is right here, and I'm going to assume that I need to start facing the same way as the word. So then I'm going to code my 123, and I'm going to try to do this upside down, so that's a little risky, but here we go. Code my 123 to get to this blue square, right? So it's going to need to turn. Drive forward, drive forward. Turn, drive forward. Okay, just do this upside down. We'll see if I got it.

(123 beeps and rattles)

Oh yeah, okay, so I made it. Now you have to remember that between each turn, you're going to need to shake to erase because you don't want to start the same project. You know, 123 is additive, so you don't want to start the same project and have it running the same code to get to here when you're actually trying to get somewhere else. So between each of your turns, you would just start a new project would be the easiest thing no matter what coding method you're doing. So that's basically it, the kids can take turns, they can play Summerland or whatever land you come up with. And there you go, so that's one idea, is to re-theme Candy Land and make it out of VEX 123 pieces.

Okay, so let's move on to a second idea. This one is Chutes and Ladders. So I'm going to take just a second to switch my stuff out real quick. And we'll talk about this one. So again, a great game for kids who can't read yet, a great game for learning to count.

(objects shuffling)

Oh boy. All right, thanks for bearing with me.

Okay, so what I have here, just four 123 tiles snapped together. Now, if you remember Chutes and Ladders is that game where the tiles have, I mean, there's numbered squares on a board, and your goal is to get to the very last square. So I sort of started making this one, and I've already numbered all of the squares. One thing I was going to mention is that the VEX GO, or I mean, the VEX 123 tiles are in groups of six, so you have six along here.

The original game has 10, and so it goes all the way up to 100. So if you wanted your kids to practice counting to 100, you could go onto our website at printables.vex.com and print off one of our printable fields and turn it into sort of like a hundreds board that you could use for this game. I will show you where to find that in just a minute. But for now, we have 36 squares here, and that's fine, like that's enough. It doesn't have to be a gigantic game, but just in case you wanted to do that.

For this one, we've gone ahead and drawn one snake. Sometimes this game is called Snakes and Ladders. So we've drawn a snake and we've drawn a ladder here. If you remember this game, you'd spin a spinner, and then you go that number of spaces. If you land on a ladder, you get to climb up. And if you land on a snake, you have to slide down from the head to the tail. You could go ahead and make it a Snakes and Ladders or a Chutes and Ladders game. Or again, you could re-theme it, and you could think about pairs of things that are opposites with up and down.

I was thinking like you could do, well, in Pittsburgh we have Inclines which are like cable cars, and we have city steps. So you could have Inclines going up, and the city steps coming down. You could do hot air balloons and parachutes, or you could do ski lifts or ski slopes. Depending on where you live, maybe there's something that would be thematic. There are a lot of possibilities for that, so you could have kids brainstorm those ideas. Then you can add them to the board. It doesn't have to have just one theme too. The whole theme could be up and down, and you could decide what's up, what things are going up and when things are going down, and mix them all together.

Let's imagine that we decided to do that, and we wanted to do hot air balloons and parachutes. Then what you want to do is you gotta think about the size of your board. Again, you might just want to use one tile if your kids are really young. It doesn't have to be four tiles. Then you want to think about where you're going to place the ups and downs, and you want to have them about 50/50, and you want to think about how many. On this board, I think like three sets, three ups and three downs are enough. Otherwise, the game might be really frustrating or take forever. Then you're just going to draw them on with your pen.

So I'm going to draw, and hopefully it won't look terrible. (chuckles) My hot air balloon is my going up. So I'm going to draw and I need to think about where I want the bottom and the top to be. Let's say I wanted, if somebody landed on three, for them to go up and then have them go up to 15. That means my hot air balloon would go on 15. There's my weird-looking balloon, here's my little basket. You get the idea. Choop-choop-choop. I can add colors 'cause these things are erasable. Okay, so here's my up, and then I'm just going to do, like, you know when you do hot air balloon rides, and it's like tethered to the ground? I'm just going to add a little tether here. So if you landed on three, you could go up to 15.

And then if I wanted to draw a down on, and, you know, I could be really mean and put the down here so that when they get really close to winning, they have to slide down. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to put it right here. This one is going to be my parachute. So parachute starts up and goes down. I have my little person. And for the sake of time, forgive my drawing. As if it would be better if I had more time. Then my parachute starts here, and it goes all the way down to here. Put an X. You'd have to agree with your students, you know, what this means. The X means down, the parachute is at the top. You'd have to talk it through so everybody knew what was going on, but you could theme it however you wanted.

And then again, you can code your 123 to be the pawn and do the actual action of the game. You do need a spinner though for this game. And I want to show you something really fun. You can just make a spinner out of a 123. So-

(123 beeps)

This is just something I printed out from the internet and I drew numbers 1 through 6 on, which is what I believe are the right numbers for Chutes and Ladders. I put it on a piece of card stock so that it would be pretty flat. It needs to be flat; if it's not, well, you'll see what happens if it happens, but it'll hinder the 123 if it's not pretty flat. Just put your 123 in the middle there, and then you can make a quick little coder project. This is the "when start 123," and the "turn random card." So then I turn them on and they should already be paired up. And they are, and I just press Play. Then my 123 is going to act as my spinner. So right there, looks like I got a line. So we all know that means you gotta spin again, right? So in this case, I got four. So my 123 spinner told me four, and I could code my robot to go forward one, two, three, four. It's really fun and it's, like, the kids will like that, I think. So there's the next person. Oh, they got three. So it's going to turn to a different spot every time. So super easy and a really fun way to use 123.

All right. Let's see. Move on to here. I want to show you this printable field real quick that I was talking about. So this is like a full-size printable field that you could tape together. And it's at printables.vex.com. You could use this to change the size of really any board that you want, board game-wise. So this might be a really good resource for you. All right, and of course, you could definitely, if you didn't want to do up and down, you could choose other types of pairs. You could do left and right, east and west, and you could change the whole theming of it, change the direction that you want the 123 to go. It's up to you and the kids to brainstorm together to come up with these ideas.

Also, I was thinking if you have Go in your school or IQ, you can also add these parts to both of these games. So to both Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land, you could incorporate some Go 123 pieces if you wanted to. And if you were doing a multi-age project, you could have the older kids build things out of Go to be the places in Candy Land or out of IQ parts. So there's a lot of different ways you could do some multi-age activities just with these games.

Alright, so those were my 123 ideas. We are now going to move on to VEX GO. Oh, I did put the slide with this spinner in there in case you wanted to print it out because I always share the slideshow. So you will have this in PD+ or in email in a couple of days.

All right, so we're going to move on now to Go. And for Go, just going to pass back here. Move some stuff. So for Go, we actually have a STEM lab that has a Battleship game. It's called Battle Boats, but it's similar to that classic game of Battleship. And it is already in a STEM lab for you. So it is at education.vex.com, and it's this Battle Boats STEM lab. So this in and of itself is a great maker activity that you can do with your kids, your kids can do themselves, and they can play this battleship-esque game, but also learn how to do coordinate grid pairs.

What I wanted to show you is the build instructions. And I'm going to show you one part of this build. So let me just get this, aha, picture and picture for you and go back a little bit. I already went ahead and built one so you can see this is the top of it. These are your little ships and this is where you keep track of your hits and misses. And then the back of it has these little pieces to hold it up so that it can be propped up, you know, because you want to be able to see it yourself, but you don't want your partner to be able to see it. But it's kind of different because it has this paper piece on here.

So I was going to show you how to attach this paper piece, 'cause it's kind of different. I don't think there's any other, well, I think maybe there's one other VEX GO build where we actually attach something with paper. So all right, let me find where that is.

Okay, so I've already got ahead and built. This is like the background piece of it. So this is the part where we're going to attach the paper and where the actual pins and battleships are going to go in. But we need to attach this paper thing, which I have already, this is linked in the STEM lab unit. I've already printed it out. And now we need to figure out how to add it to this.

So it's a little bit different, but it's not hard at all. You need four pins. So I'm going to grab those. Already marked on this paper are these little circles that signify where the pins go through. But you can see in the build instructions down there in the corner, and I'm going to kind of orient this all the way it is in the build instructions so you can see, there we go. Always easier if you orient things exactly the way they are in the build instruction.

All right, so you can see that we need our pin to be in the first hole and then skip two and one more hole. And it also needs to go up through this paper. The way you're going to do that is actually put the paper on here and poke it through the paper and into that second hole. So that's a little bit tricky. So I'm going to do it. You can just kind of jam it in there. You can also take, this is, if you can see it, just a little tiny shaft. I think it's way easier just to poke it through there with the shaft first. You want to try to make sure it's lined up pretty close to the right spot so it doesn't get all crumpled up. So I'm just using the shaft to poke it in there. Then I'm going to poke it through.

Okay, so it's going to look like this. I need to do that on both sides. So I'm going to do that real quick. Line it up. Use the shaft to poke a hole. Put my two pins in. There we go, close this up so I don't make a mess.

All right, but then you see this and it's like, well, that doesn't really fit. That's because this very clever thing is going to happen where we're actually going to flip this around and put it in, can you see that, this way, turn it over this way, into the black part. So that's why the build instructions look like this. Let me show you that page. See how it looks like it's upside down? When I first saw this, I thought that was really confusing. But basically you're just snapping it in. Okay, have it backwards. There we go, like that. You'll pull this over this way, turn this one under like this, and then you're snapping these two red pins into these two middle holes in those black beams. So I'm twisting it around. I'm snapping it in there carefully so I don't rip anything. There we go.

And there we have it. So it looks like this on the back, you can see the paper, this on the front, and then from the side you can see how the paper is actually wrapping around. I think that's really clever, and it works really well. Then what the kids would do is choose where they're going to put their battleships. They make their battleships out of these beams, little tiny beams and little pins. This is the side where they keep track of their hits and misses. They put a little blue standoff in there if it's a miss, and they put a red pin if it's a hit. Then it's played just like regular, basically like regular Battleship.

One thing that I would tell my students to do, if I was doing it with them, is that I would have them just have a little shaft and go ahead and poke the hole before they put the pin in. That way their little hands don't get frustrated trying to put the pins and the standoffs in there. When I did my battleships, I did the same thing. It just makes it so much faster.

So this is a great maker activity just for the building aspect as it is. You could, if you wanted to, have kids collaborate to make this bigger, especially if they already have gotten the hang of the coordinate grid and calling the coordinates in the right order. You can make it bigger. If you decide to do that, what I would do is I would make your background piece, not with the paper but just with the VEX GO pieces, or you could do it with IQ pieces, and then take this over to a copier and put it face down and copy it, and then use that to make your coordinate grid because that would be the easiest way to make sure that your holes are going to line up completely perfectly.

So that's one suggestion, but I think you don't even need to do that unless you have kids that have already played it this way, they're really advanced and they're ready for, like, a bigger coordinate grid. For young students, this is great. But again, you could do something very similar with IQ pieces. So there we go. That is what we have for VEX GO for now. I'm going to move on into some IQ ideas, but all of the idea, well, the idea that I'm going to show you for IQ is really something you could also do with Go. So let's do that.

Oh, I know I was going to do that. All right, now I'm going to go back to the computer view, and there we go.

[Music Cue]

All right, we did Battle Boats, and now we are moving on to the Mouse Trap-inspired game with VEX IQ. So I'm going to move my stuff, get organized, just one second and we will be onto it. And while I move stuff, I'll just talk about Mouse Trap a little bit. I asked a younger person in my office today if they had ever heard of this game, and they said no. So I think of this as a classic game. It's definitely been around for a while and been also with many iterations on the actual board. But it's a game that's kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine. So what you're trying to do is get your little mouse around the board and collect these cheese pieces without getting trapped by this Rube Goldberg machine that has a marble and does all this crazy stuff.

When I was a kid, I thought it was amazing. And I think I actually never really played the game, I just built the Mouse Trap Rube Goldberg thing and played with that. But I think it's a great game to use because it's really quite challenging to try to recreate it or to try to create a game that's kind of like Mouse Trap. And it would be a really, really fun collaboration because if you can get older kids to create different pieces of the trap or the machine that traps the mouse, and then, after they create them, try to find a way to combine them and get them to work together, that's a really great challenge, both design and engineering-wise and collaboration-wise.

So I think this particular activity is not something you would do like in an hour. I think it would probably take you a few maker sessions, depending on what you were doing. So this one's a little bit more elaborate, but I still wanted to share it with you.

Alright, so let's see. So what I think makes the most sense is that when you're doing this with kids, you show them the game, and maybe they've never played the game, so they might want to play the game a couple of times. And then have them take a look at the game and notice what pieces or what components of this game they might be able to recreate. And maybe some of them they can't, so what would they want to replace them with? And then as they are looking at them, begin to connect them with what pieces in the IQ kit might actually work.

So what I did, I'm going to kind of just talk through the process that I did because that seems to be the most useful way to approach this. So I wanted to make, in the Mouse Trap game, there's the little tower that has the cage on it.

Thank you for your attention and enthusiasm. I hope you find these activities engaging and inspiring for your students. Happy building!

And in the Mouse Trap game, if a marble hits the lever here, which is like a little diving board, it flips this diver up, it hits the cage, and then the cage slides down and traps the mouse. So I thought it would be really fun, and let me see if I can do a front view so you can see it, maybe, I don't know, a little bit better. I thought it would be really fun to try to create a replica of the cage, the little tower it goes on, and the little diving board lever that flips up and knocks the cage down to trap the mouse.

So that seems pretty complicated, and it turned out to be pretty complicated but really fun. And here's the process that I used to do it. So like I said, I decided that I wanted to make this. And then I spent time looking, thinking about the shape, okay, of the cage, right? So in the picture, it kinda looks like an upside-down basket. And it's also curved, but we don't really have curved pieces in IQ, we have some angles, but we don't have curves. So I had to think about how I could translate that using these pieces.

So what I did was I just looked through the kit and I thought about what might work. And I'm not going to, might not have time to build the whole thing, but I went through and I looked, and I wanted to have pieces that would sort of mimic a curve. So I have these angle beams here, hold this up. So I chose four of those and then I thought to myself, "Well, how am I going to put these together, and how am I going to get it to actually look kind of like a cage that could trap something underneath it?"

So what I did was I started to look at the standoff connectors because I knew I was going to need something where I could put pieces in two sides. So these pieces, these little, there we go, these little standoff connectors are cool because you can put a standoff on one side and the other side. So I started experimenting with different lengths of them to try to figure out what made the most sense. And I actually ended up with shorter ones because the first one was too long.

So I was basically like looking through, thinking about the kind of piece I needed, finding the closest thing I could find in the IQ kit, and then doing different iterations on it until I got it right. So what I ended up doing was, finally, I actually started using the little gray pins. Maybe they're here. Putting one in each side, like this, and then attaching one of these angle beams in each side. And I basically did this four times.

And as I'm doing this, like, you know, I can't say that I'm 100% sure that it's going to work. I have a plan, I'm trying it out, just like if I were a kid and I was working on something and trying to figure out if it was going to work. And I would just keep working on it until I found something that basically, you know, actually did kind of look like a cage. And I can see right now I actually have the wrong piece in here because what I realized that I needed was something that I could, let's grab our trusty pin tool here, I could put through two pieces and not just one.

So those are the dark gray pins. (indistinct) they're actually called. These are, yeah, two-by-two connector pins. I don't want to give you the wrong name. So these you could put through two pieces at once. So I put it in there. And then I was able to attach one of these and then attach another one of these on the other side. So it really took a few minutes to figure that out, but there we go. So I did that basically four times until I had this piece here.

And then I got to thinking, well, I need something, 'cause at that point it looked like this, which is kind of cool. But all the sides had this opening here, and I wanted something to keep the mouse inside. So what I did was I then started thinking about, "Okay, I need something that can come down this way," right? But I can't just take any old beam and attach it there. There isn't any way to attach it.

When you're working with kids, you can think about what pieces in the kit can allow you to change the direction or the angle that you're going to attach to, so that you can attach it facing the way you want to. What I ended up coming up with was this situation right here. This 90-degree standoff connector is like a little right angle, right? It allows you to change the direction of things, if that makes sense. I added it in here, and I'm going to hold it up so you can see it a little bit better. I had this right here that I can add a pin to. I attached a pin to the back of one of these beams, inserted it into this little hole, and then I had a little bit more of a cage. I could have left it like that, but I wanted it to stand up well. So, I found this other angle beam and put it in there so that it was basically going to be level-ish with the blue and the orange beams. It's not perfect, but it works. There we go. I had my little cage, and the next thing was to figure out how to make the STEM that the Mouse Trap cage is up on.

For that, take this off so you can see it. This was super easy. I just took a beam, got a bunch of smaller beams, and put them on here with pins going in different directions. I can rotate them and make them go however I want. In the Mouse Trap game, when the little cage falls down, it has a corrugated edge, so it wobbles and makes a little noise. I remember being a kid and really liking that noise, so I decided to do that. I also noticed that it was a little tippy because of where I put it. I could have chosen to put it in the middle, but instead, I thought I'd just anchor it down onto a tile. That's why it is like this. I'm going to try to put it back even though I can't see very well. There we go. All right, so that was really easy.

The next thing was how to make a diving board or a seesaw for the little character to be on, so I can flip 'em up, hit this, and have it fall down. This was really cool because I looked closely at the piece in the Mouse Trap game, and, just so you can see it, it's this diving board piece right here. I looked at the connection between the diving board itself and how it was connected onto here. I found that we actually had pretty much an identical piece in the IQ kit, which is this piece right here. Let me put my hand flat so you can see it. It's this connector, the one that has a little sort of bump, cutout bump here. It worked perfectly as the piece for the seesaw. I stuck it in the middle, thinking that I was going to use this little cutout here to be like the fulcrum of the seesaw.

I built very simply by attaching, let me show you this because, again, with these IQ pieces, there's a similar VEX GO piece, but we have this connector here that has a pin that comes out of two sides that are perpendicular to each other. What that lets me do is attach something in this particular way, where I have a pin that's going down and a pin that's going to the side, and that lets me change the direction of this. Instead of placing it flat, I can place it to the side, and that makes me have a really good little base for my seesaw or my lever or my diving board, whatever you want to call it. I can just balance this, how did I do it? Yep, like, right like that. So, this cutout is balanced on this beam, and it is a perfect little lever. Then I just attach it to the board. I will try to put it back. There we go. All right, so theoretically, I could put my Colonel Joe or whoever else on there. I could balance this really carefully up here. I don't know if I can do it right now.

Thank you for your attention and for joining me in this exploration of building with kids. I hope you found this helpful and inspiring for your own projects.

Yeah, and if I'm lucky, I can pop it up there, it can hit this, and then this will knock it down, and it will catch the mouse inside. So it's not perfect, but it was a really great starting point for this project. And if you're doing this kind of thing with kids, it's not going to be perfect. They're going to have to iterate on it quite a bit. I would suggest that they iterate in chunks.

When I did it, I didn't try to make the whole thing and then look at it and figure out if it worked. I took one piece at a time, figured out what it looked like, what it looked like it would work, tried it. And then when it didn't work, I asked myself why. Then I tried to answer that question and move on with my iteration until I got something that I kind of liked.

So I think this would be a really fun little bit of inspiration that you could do with kids with this game and have them make a Rube Goldberg-esque sort of Mouse Trap-inspired board game. Once your kids got done making all of their machine pieces, then you could have them try to put them together. You could have kids work on individual field tiles and then add them together, snap them together, and then try to figure out how to attach everything so that it worked right.

If you wanted to, you could actually make the game board itself for Mouse Trap, which to me is actually kind of the least interesting part of this game. But it does have like a regular kind of game board that you roll a dice and move a mouse character around. You can re-theme this game just like you could re-theme any of these games. So if you wanted to try to trap something else or make a totally different kind of collaborative Rube Goldberg machine game that kind of goes in the same vein as Mouse Trap, you could do that. So there's a whole bunch of different possibilities with this as well.

Yeah, all right, so that was my Mouse Trap-inspired game with VEX IQ. I have a few more ideas that I was thinking about, might be really fun for both Go and IQ. The games Sorry! and Trouble are both really similar games where you can make a game board and actually use VEX Go code base to be the character and code your Go, just like we were coding the 123 robot, to actually be the paw in the game. You could do a variation on Hungry Hungry Hippos with Hungry Hungry Robots with four different IQ robots or four different Go robots. That would be really fun.

I wanted to have time to see if I could figure out how to build a Connect Four game with Go or IQ pieces. But that would be another really fun design challenge, I think. And of course, you can add actual checkers or whatever else. It's makerspace, you can add whatever pieces you want. The other thing I thought would be really fun was to try to build a contraption that was actually a Scrabble tile dispenser. So you could, you know, challenge kids to find out a way to randomly dispense seven Scrabble tiles so that people could play the Scrabble game. So that could be fun, or it could be one Scrabble tile, depending on how you approached it.

So once you start thinking about this, there's so, so many ideas that you can come up with. Oh, the other thing was is that, I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but in the Trouble game, in the center of it, there's like a little popper that pops a dice and rolls it for you. And that was something else that I thought might be really fun to try to figure out is how to build that pop-o-matic dice roller with Go or IQ pieces. So those are just a few other ideas that you can think about in your head.

All right, so we've had about 45 minutes here of ideas. I don't know if anyone has a question or a comment or another idea, but if so, great. If not, I will let you go 15 minutes early and see you back here another time.

All right, if we have no questions or comments,

I really thank you for attending this session, and I hope you will be able to find some use for these ideas. And if you do, certainly tell us about them in the PD+ community because we really want to know what you take away from these sessions.

So thanks a lot, and I'll see you back here soon.

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