I found a handful of Java applets I wrote in high school. I lost a lot of my other games at some point, but these ones were still sitting on my website. Unfortunately, modern browsers do not run Java applets anymore, so having the files was not quite enough for my kids to see them. […]
Our Axis & Allies WWI game has been going on for months. Daniel, Shantell, and I keep trying to figure out what we can afford before committing to a move, so I made a little unit calculator. Much easier than adding the same numbers over and over! I had some help from AI with this […]
I found a way to play some of the old Flash games Shantell and I made! When Flash disappeared from browsers, these felt a little lost, even though I still had the files. The trick is Ruffle, a Flash emulator written in Rust that runs in the browser through WebAssembly. I added Ruffle’s JavaScript loader […]
I am teaching Rebecca some more programming by helping her make a word game called Wordchuck. It scrambles six letters, and you try to find the words hiding in them. Having a game to play together makes the programming more fun. There is a woodchuck, of course. I wanted to work on breaking a problem […]
I am teaching Rebecca how to make a little Dodge game in App Lab. It is still called Untitled Project over there. Naming things can wait. We are having fun making it work together: move your square with the mouse and try not to run into the other squares. This is one of my favorite […]
For another programming project with Rebecca, I wanted to teach her how two computers could share a game. We came back to tic-tac-toe, but this time one player creates a game and gets a code that the other player can use to join. A fun new problem for a familiar game. I wanted Rebecca to […]
I am teaching Rebecca how to put together a little adventure game called Cake Quest. So far we have a bedroom, an inventory, and some wheat seeds to pick up. You can also equip a meow. Meowing at the wheat does not make it meow back. Important game feature. I wanted to help her break […]
One of the things I like about teaching Rebecca to program is getting to make little games together. This time we made four squares that look almost the same, except one is a slightly different color. Pick that one. It gets surprisingly hard! I wanted to practice random numbers and keeping score. We start with […]
For the hackathon, I made a storybook that can come up with a new story, illustrate it, and read it aloud. The idea is to let the kids ask for something a little more specific than whichever book happens to be on the shelf. The app is React and TypeScript. It asks GPT-3’s text-davinci-002 model […]
I have been teaching Rebecca about colors in code, and we made another little game to play with the idea. It gives you a random color and three sliders. Adjust the red, green, and blue until your color matches it before time runs out. I wanted to connect the numbers to what she could see. […]
