The kids of today are in a sorry state; have you seen the limp products that pass as chemistry sets these days. Finding one with a little meths burner, a cute liebig condenser or anything even slightly toxic is nigh on impossible (and to my dismay I can’t even find the ‘junior mad scientist’ one I had as a kid to bequeath to my boys). It falls upon me to introduce them to proper science through makeshift concoctions of any household stuff I can get my mits on.

You will need
Household Borax powder (I got enough for a couple of gallons of snot for £3.50 from the Green Shop)
PVA glue (I like the vats of the Eco Friendly version)
water
green food colouring
a jam jar and lid per child

First of all stir up a Borax solution. Take a cup, add some warm water and a tablespoon of Borax. Let it sit whilst you measure out the rest of the stuff so that any excess settles to the bottom. Do be careful, Borax whilst in powder form is a little toxic; so don’t stick it up any noses. Once it’s in water though, it’s about as toxic as salt… which is more toxic than you might think, if you just ask a passing slug.

You will need 3 parts water to 2 parts PVA glue, measure them into your jam-jar and add a couple of drops of dye. Now screw that lid down and give it a good shake until the water and PVA become one sloppy, runny and slightly foamy green mess.

Now for the cool bit. Add 1 part Borax solution. A little less for a gloopy goo (for fake boogers); or a little more for more rubbery snot (this can be used as a farty-putty, scoop it out of the jar and press it back in to make really rude flatulent reverberations). Then get them to shake and shake and shake. Over the next minute or two a lump of snot will form and start bouncing around the jar. I found that a bigger jar helped this happen smoother and faster; though it worked quite well on a small scale too.

Scoop and smear.

ps. do make sure you know your chemicals, and if you do try syribia’s recipe for different types of snot and slime at Instructables

Enjoy

tag... play for today, 5up, 8up, enjoy and achieve, geeky

I like water bombs, boys like water bombs, Mrs. Welikeplay isn’t quite so fond. But these aren’t the ones you chuck around, theses are little inky explosions in the safety of a jam-jar.  The boys in the welikeplay labs love doing this one, to the extent of rearranging the kitchen furniture so as to hang around upside down to give it a little nuclear mushroom effect.

You will need:
1 jam-jar
a pipette (or use a straw by taking covering the end to pick up droplets)
a little water
a little oil
some vibrant food colouring

Make a mess.

Enjoy.

tag... play for today, 5up, enjoy and achieve, geeky

Children and gaming are rattling around the news rooms again. The UK’s gaming violence study with Dr Byron has been up and running for a month or so. On the other side of the pond, a gaming poll has indicated that 43% of parents never ever play a video game with their kids, and only 27% play for more than an hour alongside their kids. Perhaps its a simple lack of time rather than a fear of pwnage from your own offspring. It is a concern, just yesterday I was asked the same question by three different parents, “how much should we let kids play?”

Games have changes since I was a kid. Growing up with a Dragon 32 and a geek-dad for company there were quite a few games for me to play. Granted we had to have a chittering tape player to load them over a timespan usually reserved for intercontinental drift, and in which choosing the wrong cassette led to one of pa’s ‘I’ll teach you to spell’ games. Though quite usefully this taught me to hack so as to achieve top marks, with probably more effort involved. But the one factor in all these games were that they were unanimously one player enterprises. The closest we had to ‘team’ gaming was to let one brother wiggled Tails lamely back and forth, whilst the other took full control of Sonic. Gamers were generally solitary oyster-like creatures whilst at play.

Things have moved on, Ultimate Alliance and Fantastic Four have four way cooperative play. Games can now be bought with pocket money. Games are now a lot more watch-able from the sidelines through their HD glory. And the umbrella is wider, games like Nintendogs or Scrabble on the DS have taken games to new or old places. Video games are now anything but solitary.

At casa welikeplay I’ve thought long and hard about this and I run the following with my kids.

You may play for as long as your dad/mum is interested. There will also be a mandatory day off every week. Arguing with the judgement of parents makes tomorrow a game free day.

Such an arrangement limits games to those which are either multiplayer, so we growed-ups can join in. Or games like the new Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction which, though only a one player game, is highly engaging and watchable. Or games like Big Brain Academy, which we’re happy to feign interest as we’ve bought the line that they’re somehow making my kids smarter.

I’m lucky, I’m at home to see my boys after school. And I like play. So I do get time to do the whole interest-rule-thing. If I didn’t I’d have to find some sort of arbitrary time slot.  I also like to think that it this parent play lifts the genre, perhaps they’ll be up there with film one day. So I’ve got them young, and perhaps those teen years will be easier as a result; though I’ve a lurking suspicion that unless I hone my skills I’m going to get pwnd time and again in the next 12 years.

tag... play, gamer, geeky, philosophising

I don’t worry unduly about my kids when their online, usually because they first have to wrest the laptop top from my hands and then put up with me lurking to reclaim it. So surfing has become a communal activity at the welikeplay HQ; we’re looking up their latest question (last week it was, how many people are there in the world?) then talking about all the stuff they come across as it happens. May I recommend this as a set up from a young age as the best possible way of staying safe. None of this computers in your bedroom stuff, the internet was set up as a corporate rather than a solitary medium and is best used as such.

Last month we even got past browsing and journeyed together into Second Life (if you’ve come across Eco Dynamo, I do apologise for seeming to have a hive-mind, there’s three of us on the keyboard at once), though I did a reccie the night before to check out the calibre of the neighbourhoods we would visit. A very good way of passing an hour or so during the holidays.

I’ve talked with the boys about icky or frightening stuff they might find online; and until their hormones kick in they’re not too interested, though funnily enough they seemed more worried about stumbling upon it by accident. To that end I’ve just deleted their IE shortcuts and installed FoxFilter for Firefox. This scans the page for dodgy words and phrases and blocks.  OK it blocked a post here which had the word adult and the word free (and will now block this post too) until I added welikeplay.org to the exclude list.  Now a determined child could circumnavigate FoxFilter, but that’s not the point. I’ve not stuck it in to thwart them, but to stop any mis-clicks that would lead to “Daddy, what are they doing?”… “What, upside-down?”

And that, for now, will do.

tag... play, 5up, 8up, geeky, stay safe

I was browsing through some of my own favourite feeds (hey, you can get mine too), when I came across [mck] posting about a cool new flash site.  Papercritters allows you and your kids to make printable paper people.

Sure it sucks up bandwidth, but it’s so cool; you grab and drop eyes and mouths and tats onto your template, print and cut and stick.  You can go further and upload your families visage onto generator; possibly to create a small army of carboard clones to lurk around the house and spook the unwary.

It’s really easy to create; No1 child created some sort of urban-skate monster in a few minutes, though the construction may well take him a while longer.  The sense of achievement is palatable.

Enjoy.

tag... play for today, 8up, enjoy and achieve, geeky, makes

by Crayola.

For those on the other side of the pond a little clarification, every 5th November in the UK we have Bonfire Night to celebrate - by setting fire to stuff and blowing up fireworks - the last time we caught a terrorist.

The weekend being what it is, and the 5th being Monday, there was a lot of fireworks going off last night. Whilst looking up at the sky with the little ones they were wondering how you went about doing a display. So this morning I trawled through my book marks and found them this online firework display maker to play with.

Enjoy and remember your firework code.

tag... play for today, 5up, 8up, geeky

I love crunchy autumnal walks. The cold crisp air, small children bobbing like balloons through the trees, the colours and the sounds; it’s childcare bliss. The only down side seems to be the pockets full of collected treasures that are presented to me. Yellow and red leaves, conkers half shelled, sycamore and pine and bits of interesting bark. Collecting isn’t the problem, it’s the storage. These things will pocket-compost if left; not nice.

These treasures have to be kept special though, so I’ve been racking the grey cells and come up with the Autumnal Scan. Once we’re back from the walk we’re going to polish up all the treasures and drop them artfully onto the computer’s scanner. Voila, one printable picture to stick up. While the detritus can be happily fed to the worms.

Enjoy.

tag... play for today, 3up, 5up, be healthy, collecting, enjoy and achieve, geeky, out and about

If you’ve not come across Howtoons on your trawls through the internet you really must. Blueprints as cartoons. Next time I’ve a few quid to spare I’m off to my local Homebase to stock up on piping for some marshmallow gun fun.

Expect further posts as we guniea-pig these cool makes and hacks

tag... playpeople, 8up, geeky, makes