Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share Read Online Free PDF Page A

be creative and decide how to connect the dots.

COLORING BOOK PAGES
    Obviously, older kids and those with more advanced coloring skills are going to be hankering for something a bit more challenging than connect-the-dots. What’s great is that these graphics programs have filters that let you kick out coloring pages by the ream with only a couple of clicks. They require even less work than the dot-to-dots.
    Pick an image. For this example, I used a snapshot I took of my classic Nauga ( www.nauga.com/promoitems_nauga.html ) in my office. I opened the image in Pixelmator and then used “Filter-Stylize-Line Overlay” to automatically find the edges in the image and drop everything else out, making a perfect coloring sheet (there are settings you can tweak to get it “just right”).

    In Photoshop Elements, the process is nearly as easy. Open the image, and use “Filter-Stylize-Find Edges.” Then use “Enhance-Convert to Black-and-White” to drop out the colors, and you have much the same effect.
    In GIMP, you can try “Colors-Desaturate,” then “Filters-Edge Detect-Neon” and “Colors-Invert” to get a similar effect. You may need to play with some settings to get an optimal result (and you can save those settings for future uses). GIMP is just as powerful as the other programs in many ways, but it is not quite as user-friendly, so there’s a bit more of a learning curve.
    Once you have the technique down, you can whip these out en masse and build your kids (or get your kids to build) their own coloring books, using images they find online (Google Image Search is excellent for this, though make sure you keep an eye out for inappropriate content; or try the Web sites for the cartoon shows they like—Disney or Nickelodeon) or scans from other books or sources.
    One other way to do this—with slightly less creativity (and therefore less geek factor) but without the need for special software—is the Coloring Page Maker at the Crayola Crayons Web site: http://play-zone.crayola.com/play-zone/index.htm .

Create the Ultimate Board Game

    I n an age when the video game seems to be king, it’s interesting to notice that when you walk into any mega-mart toy section, you still find whole walls devoted to the board game in all its varieties. Everyone still loves the low-tech joy of Life, or Risk, Chutes and Ladders, or other classic board games.
    For many (including me), one of the best board games was Mouse Trap (not to be confused with the Broadway play), where you got to build a homemade Rube Goldberg device to catch a plastic mouse. If you didn’t play it on a perfectly flat, level table, it was often a challenge to make it work just right, but when it did—magic!
    But when you look at any board game, when you strip it down to its core, there are elements that are common to them all: playing pieces that move a number of spaces based upon random number generation; special spaces that do interesting things; special cards that grant a boon, or curse the players; a final space to be reached representing the end of a harrowing journey. In short: adventure. Dress up the structure of the game in whatever outfit you like—the struggle to reach the top of a path (Chutes and Ladders), the simulation of a modern life (Life), the quest for world domination (Risk)—most of the basics are still there.
    So, given the hacking, maker spirit of the geek, what’s to stop us from making our own board games? Nothing, I say!

    Buildrz (my name for the generic game) is an open-source, build-it-yourself board game for GeekDads to build and play with their kids. The point is, rather than running to the store and buying a game based on someone else’s ideas, you can take the idea of a board game and add your own themes and imagination to make it your own.
    The idea of a board game is very simple: It is a journey from one place to another, based upon some randomness (dice roll or spinner), with challenges (tasks to overcome, strategies