A little programming lesson with Rebecca turned into a bouncing ball experiment. Move the mouse to choose where the ball goes, then click to drop it. There is even a shadow underneath. I like having a simple project we can play with while I teach her something new. I wanted to show her how animation […]
One of the fun parts of teaching Rebecca to program is that our projects do not have to be useful. This time we made a funny face in Game Lab. Moving the mouse stretches its head and mouth and moves its eyes. The arrow keys change the color. Pretty entertaining. I wanted to show her […]
I have been teaching Rebecca some programming with a game she already knows: tic-tac-toe. We built this one together in App Lab. Knowing the rules is the easy part. Getting the computer to follow all of them gives us something fun to figure out together. I wanted to practice keeping track of whose turn it […]
Somebody posted the challenge to change one letter in a book title and ruin it. Naturally, I decided the computer should help come up with the bad suggestions. The page has an embedded dictionary and a small JavaScript search. For each word in the title, it tries replacing one character at a time with another […]
Rebecca loves programming, so I have been teaching her some JavaScript by making little projects together in Code.org. A drawing app is a fun place to start because she can see something happen right away. This version has different brushes, a size slider, and a custom color picker. I wanted to work on events and […]
For our family Kids Day, I made a digital scavenger hunt. Riddle Quest starts with the kids and Mizzet waking up in a secret base in the sky. Getting home is going to take a little more work than finding the front door. I used RPG Maker MV again, but the focus here is on […]
I made the kids an RPG starring our cat. Mizzet wakes up hungry and goes looking for food, which seems like a fairly accurate starting point for a cat adventure. Things get a little more complicated from there. This one uses RPG Maker MV, so the game runs in a browser with the engine’s JavaScript […]
Here is a little dictionary experiment: give every letter a number, with A equal to 1 and Z equal to 26, and add up each word. I wanted to see which words landed on multiples of 26. The page carries a big word list right in the HTML. JavaScript walks through it, skips entries containing […]
I made a browser map of our family Minecraft world. It is fun to look around at everything we have built without actually logging into Minecraft. This uses Minecraft Overviewer to turn the saved world into isometric image tiles. The browser only needs the tiles for the part of the world you are looking at, […]
I made a little Jeopardy game for my Sunday school class. A blue board full of dollar amounts seemed like a more interesting way to review the lesson than just asking the questions one at a time. Everything is in one HTML file: the board, the styling, and a JavaScript array of questions, answers, and […]
