More Fun at the Cartoon Art Museum, Plus Bonus Game Tip

Last Saturday, we held another "How to Draw with Your Kid / How to Draw with Your Grownup" class at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. There was such a huge range of personalities apparent right from the start of class! We did collaborative drawing (or "drawing jams"), made up lists of words and used them to create characters, did some super-fast animation, and finally talked about how to make up your own board game.

During the board game part, as I was lamenting the need for dice or a spinner, a couple of the kids let me know there's a simple way to make a spinner with just paper, a pencil, and a paperclip. Now, maybe everyone else in the world knows this but me, but for me it was a cool new trick. So I'll share it here.

You take a piece of paper, and draw a circle on it. Then, put numbers around it, like a pie. Then, put a pencil, tip down, on the point in the center. Now, lift up the pencil, and put a paperclip down so the pencil will stick through one end of it when you stick it back down. That's your spinner. Now, while holding the pencil upright, you just flick the paperclip in a circle and see what number it lands on. Voila.

And here I had all these elaborate schemes for making a deck of number cards, or stealing dice from other games in your home (leading to inevitable "game piece creep"), and what have you.

I'll be at two libraries in Rohnert Park and Petaluma tomorrow, doing more grownup/kid drawing jams. And now I can tell them how to make a spinner. Whee!