Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share

by Ken Denmead

  So, what are the factors that make up the geek? I’d like to posit that the geek is a combination of common personality factors that we see in all sorts of people. Indeed, these factors taken alone or only in pairs may lead to less desirable characters. See, for example, the Venn diagram below (talk about geeky!), where I’ve described the possible combinations of key personality factors that make up the geek, and its associated stereotypes: Knowledgeability, Obsessiveness, and Social Skills.

  Knowledgeability represents having significant stored information with easy recall. That knowledge may be broad and relatively shallow—the know-it-all—or it may cover only a few topics but be deep and profound—the expert /problem solver.

  Obsessiveness is a person’s ability to lose himself in something he has a passion for. Common symptoms include losing track of time while coding HTML/ CSS or staying up until four A.M. to finish Portal because you had to earn watching the final credits (and hearing that awesome Jonathan Coulton song).

  Social Skills can mean a lot of things, not all of which are about being “popular,” which geeks and nerds always feel they never were in their formative years. But geeks do at least have enough presence and personality to form lasting relationships, which helps differentiate them.

  So first, it’s easy to tag all the stand-alones: Dorks are the people who are obsessive without the introspection to recognize it in themselves or how it could affect others. Dweebs know everything but can’t apply or express themselves. Goobers are good-natured but lazy idiots—no one minds them, but they aren’t much use.

  It starts to get interesting when you begin combining the traits. The classic nerd has knowledge/intelligence AND the obsessive nature that produces results. You can’t expect them to carry on conversations that won’t lose a non-nerd audience—they would talk your ear off about something as nerdy as the exciting application of quantum theory on the flow of mold over a piece of cheese, but set them to work on a project without distraction, and you’ll be able to mine the results for pure gold (especially if it has to do with World of Warcraft and, you know, gold mining).

  The twit—well, I suppose there are other names for this person, probably a lot of regional variations—but the twit combines obsessiveness and social skills into a double-edged sword. This could be that sales guy who can talk up a storm but who really doesn’t know squat, or it could be the diligent hard worker everyone likes but who really just doesn’t get it.

  And then there’s the gadfly. He’s smart and he gets invited to parties, but he’s lazy. Or worse, he’s intellectually smart but emotionally ignorant, and doesn’t care. He’s the one most likely to be the pedant in any gathering, and he probably uses people to get the work done he finds beneath him.

  Of course those are extremes, and there are perfectly lovely, functional people who fall into those categories; but they’re not the ones we’re here to talk about. In the sweet spot, right there in the middle, is the tripartite synergy that creates the geek. The mixture of knowledge (about comic books, particle physics, or the works of Mozart), obsessiveness (they’ll sit in front of a computer or a workbench for hours perfecting, building, or playing anything), and social skills (they actually get together with people for pen-and-paper RPGs or get in line with a bunch of friends to see the midnight showing of the next Star Trek movie), that makes a well-rounded, self-sustaining person of affable oddity.

  Now maybe weigh it just slightly toward the social skill set, and you have someone who can actually get a date, find a mate, get married, and procreate. That, in a nutshell, is how a GeekDad comes into being. The conditions need to continue to be favorable—is there support at home for ongoing geekiness? Will infecting the child(ren) be allowed? How many times will the wife feign a chuckle when you lift your little tyke and in a deep voice intone, “Luke, I am your father” (knowing it’s a misquote) before it gets old? How many jokes about containment breaches will be tolerated at diaper-changing time?

  It helps immeasurably when your mate is a geek, too (but that’s another book). I’ve been lucky enough to have that situation in my marriage. In fact, not only have my little quirks been tolerated, but some of them have actually been encouraged. And in return, I encourage back. I mean, how many men can say their wives wanted a trip to a science fiction convention for their anniversary? I’m one lucky man.

  But the best part is getting to share with my kids, share the geeky things that informed my childhood and continue to inform my existence: Star Wars, Star Trek, math, science, reading, writing, music, computers and video games, movies and television. I can’t tell you the joy of having my kids get into Doctor Who and comic books and Lord of the Rings, and then talking with them about the important aspects of the stories and watching them just soak it up.

  I lived through the school years as a breed apart (though I had good friends who were geeks, too), so it makes me feel great to be able to inform and guide my kids through the social aspects, and the occasional challenges, of growing up as a geek. All parents want to protect their kids, but I like to think the best protection I can offer them is to help them understand what will happen, why, and how to best deal with it. I want them to know that different isn’t bad, and that being intelligent and inquisitive is something to be proud of.

  Indeed, that’s what being a GeekDad really means for me. For all our personality quirks and interests in pursuits that are outside the mainstream (or at least interests more technical than is usually palatable for the mainstream), we’re all about understanding, and communicating, and connecting with others by sharing what we love and helping others to grok it as well. Of course there’s a biological imperative to have kids and raise them to survive and thrive, but we want them to be happy, too—whatever happiness may mean to them.

  I’ll encourage my kids to love what I do, but I won’t force it on them, and when they want to try something different, I’m happy to let them just as long as they come at it like a geek: They should be knowledgeable about it, be a little obsessive about it, and get along with the other people who are doing it. That’s what all the greatest geeks do.

  GEEKY PROJECTS FOR DADS AND KIDS TO SHARE

  Most “parenting” books aren’t about things you can do with your kids. Most are about things to do to your kids, tricks and tactics for tweaking their behavior in some desired manner usually at odds with what kids really want: to play, and spend real quality time with you.

  I’m not saying all those books are bad. Some of them do try to reinforce the idea of spending quality time (though I’d really like to find a new phrase to replace quality time) with your kids. This book has the same goal of those others: to help you share time with your kids in their formative years in constructive, educational ways, without making that time seem as if it’s supposed to be constructive or educational (not always easy). The difference here is that from a geek’s perspective, constructive and educational may not mean what all those other books think it means. Here’s what makes our approach different: Geeks like games that require a fantastic imagination.

  Geeks love science and knowing how things work. Experimentation is the best way to learn those things. If things go “boom” in the process, all the better.

  Geeks love finding interesting, creative solutions for problems that could be solved in a more mundane fashion.

  Geeks love to play, but in playing, to build and learn as well.

  There is a plethora of projects included here about an eclectic array of subjects, from board games to electronics, crafts to coding. But I’m not here to tell you exactly what to do. The instructions are meant give you a structure to start your adventure with your kids. Each of these projects will allow for extensive customization and personalization. Indeed, what I have in my workshop and available at the hardware store in my town may be rather different from what you have. So I expect you to improvise, adapt, and even (quite likely) improve on these projects.

  PROJECT INFORMATION

  At the start of each project, y
ou’ll see a table with summary information to give you an idea what to expect from it, and there are some symbols not unlike what you see in a restaurant or hotel review to explain cost and difficulty. Here’s a legend to explain their meaning.

  One thing you’ll notice as you go through the projects in this book is that they are not long, costly, or overly difficult and involved projects that take too much work before paying off in the fun department. If you and your kid have the kind of patience and geeky determination to spend days/weeks/months on a project, then let me suggest you take up painting Warhammer armies or mapping the visible sky in your area with a telescope you built from scratch.

  It’s not that I don’t have respect for folks that do that kind of thing! On the contrary, they are the epitome of geekhood, and I am not worthy to clean their brushes or polish their lenses. I just don’t have that kind of time or energy. I want to do something fun with my kids NOW (or at least in the few minutes to couple of hours it takes to complete any project in this book). So you’ll find that the most important common features all these projects have is that they are accessible, affordable, and truly buildable for just about anyone with an ounce of geek in them.

  Okay, it’s time. Go get your kid(s) and get started!

  MAKE YOUR OWN GEEKY GAMES AND CRAFTS

  Make Your Own Cartoons

  There aren’t many folks, geeky or not, who don’t love cartoons. Beyond the Sunday paper or The New Yorker, there are cartoons out there that have particular appeal for us geeks: Dork Tower, xkcd, or PvP Online. Reading them is fun, but as with most things, wouldn’t it be even more fun to try to create our own?

  Maybe you or your kids have already had a good idea for a comic story line or comic characters of your own. Don’t worry if your drawing or graphics arts skills aren’t up to the task—this project will help you overcome that niggling deficiency. Instead of pen on paper, you can use the tools you’re familiar—even handy—with to create something visually distinctive, creative, and all your own.

  The basic idea for this project is to use LEGO minifigs or other similar action figures or toys as your cartoon characters, photograph them rather than draw them, and then manipulate those images on your computer to create the comic. Before you actually get to photographing, you need to sort out the basic features of your project.

  CHOOSING YOUR SUBJECT

  What’s your strip going to be about? Is it you and your kids, or some imaginary characters? I decided to base my strip on the amusing Twitter messages of well-known geeky writer/actor/dad Wil Wheaton. Wil has the habit of tweeting the imagined conversations he has with various programs on his computer (especially iTunes) or with his dog. Because of the character-length limitations of Twitter, these conversations often take on the form of quick scripts that I realized would fit perfectly into standard six- or nine-panel comic strips. You may decide to use amusing vignettes from everyday life, outrageous things your kids have said or done, or just about any other story that can be told in three to nine panels.

  CREATING THE FIGURES

  You need to make your characters by using some kind of action figure you can pose and modify depending upon the story you’re telling. To make Wil as a cartoon character for my project, I discovered a really easy idea: I turned to LEGO minifigs, the little people that come in many LEGO sets. Here’s how you can create your own characters: 1. Go online to the shopping section of LEGO’s Web site (you might have success at your local LEGO store as well) and buy a few stock minifigs (lower and upper body, and head with no special features).

  2. Then, in the à la carte area, purchase an extra dozen basic minifig heads (called Mini Head No. 1 at the LEGO store—it’s the one with the simple smile).

  3. When you have them in hand, you can customize them to match your desired characters. I found an image of Wil online that is well known to his fans (he’s wearing a very particular clown-face sweater) and re-created it on the minifig torso, using fine-tipped felt markers. If you have trouble getting a minifig torso without any markings on it, it’s easy to scrape the markings off the plastic with an X-Acto knife or razor blade.

  4. To give you a palette of emotions for your cartoon character, use the extra minifig heads. Just like the bodies, the printings on the heads are easily scraped off with a blade. For my Wil minifig, I took one head, scraped off the generic smile, and drew in a surprised “oh” look with a fine-tipped black Sharpie. If your script has your character going through many adventures and scenes, you might want to create sad faces, happy faces, startled faces, and so on. Since the heads are interchangeable on the body, you can have as many different looks as you can think of for the same character.

  Your kids can have fun crafting their own characters. You can also use minifigs for stock characters in your script. There are all kinds of minifigs available, so coming up with an astronaut or cowboy or law-enforcement officer is pretty easy.

  WRITING THE SCRIPT

  It’s always a good idea to start a comic strip project by writing a quick script to break down each shot so you know exactly what figures you need and what pictures you’ll have to take. Even though the idea of this project is to avoid actual illustration, work with your child to sketch out a visualization of your idea, blocking out the shots and scribbling in the words or thought balloons you’ll need. This will help you figure out what kind of layout you want—how many panels, what size, and what relation to each other. And don’t forget that sometimes a panel with no words can be the funniest of all!

  BUILDING YOUR STUDIO

  The setup you use for photographing your figures can be very simple and cheap, or very involved and expensive, depending upon how complex you want to get, and how polished a final product you want to create. Here are some tips: The most expensive tool is also the one you’re most likely to already own: a digital camera with a zoom lens. Your child may even own one.

  A tripod will be invaluable help. You will need to set up shots that look very similar from frame to frame, with only slight changes to the position of your characters or to their facial expressions. Having the camera locked down in one spot is vital to achieving that.

  You’ll want a light box of some kind to properly light your subjects and to create a background as blank as possible, to simplify the image editing later on. You could start as simply as some white poster board taped into four sides of a cube (bottom, back, and two sides—leaving the top and front open for lighting), and then some inexpensive lights mounted above to give good enough flood lighting to minimize shadows. A very tiny step up would be to purchase one of the portable light studios available online or at most stores that sell cameras. These usually don’t cost more than $40 and will do the job admirably.

  SHOOTING YOUR SCRIPT

  Once you have your equipment set up, it’s time to take pictures—and plan on taking a lot of them. You’ll probably want to start out with some basic shots to test the lighting and exposure, and, while the auto settings on your camera may work well, you might want to consider using the manual settings to ensure that every picture you take has the same exposure and color balance, for continuity of look. I used an inexpensive DSLR mounted on a tripod, with a fairly slow shutter speed and a delay so I could hit the button and step back before the picture snapped, just to get things really sharp and well lit.

  Use the script you worked out earlier to set up your scenes, but don’t skimp on taking pictures. Set up each scene a couple of ways, play with the blocking of your characters (where they are in relation to one another), and take a series of pictures with slight differences in stance, perspective, close-up, long shot, and so on. It’s always better to have multiple choices for each frame when you get to postproduction, rather than being unhappy with something and having to set up and shoot again.

  And don’t worry much about the resolution of the images, either. You don’t need to be shooting in your camera’s RAW format here. A typical 3-megapixel resolution will do just fine, and you can fill your image basket with
hundreds of shots to choose from when it comes time to start composing your strips.

  ASSEMBLING YOUR STRIP

  Now comes the composition stage. If your child is younger, you can run the keyboard and s/he can act as artistic director. If your kid is older or very savvy with the technology, now’s your chance to step back and watch his imagination run wild.

  You have a range of options available to you for actually building the strip:You could use something as simple as Microsoft Word and create the strip frames from Tables by pasting your images into the panels and using text boxes for the lettering.

  You could also build the strips in many of the graphics programs out there—Photoshop Elements, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), or Pixelmator come to mind.

  There are also programs dedicated to crafting homemade comic strips. I used Comic Life Magiq ($50 from www.plasq.com) for the Mac, because it has great templates and image manipulation tools so you don’t have to touch up your pictures before getting them assembled into a comic.

  When you’ve settled on the tool, it’s time to get creative. Everything is up to you—what do you find funny or compelling? How do you like seeing a story or a joke told? Here are a few things to think about:Since so many comics are almost literally made up of talking heads, assembling your panels may be as simple as using the same picture over a couple of times and just slightly adjusting the orientation so that it looks like a different shot.