Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (2 page)

I hoped that there were other people out there with the same ambition who might respond to my posts. There were. Today, a couple years after the site launched, it attracts more than a million readers per month and has more than two dozen contributors. Led by Ken Denmead, who has run the site since late 2007, GeekDad. com, now an official
Wired
blog, has become one of the top parenting sites on the Web. It turns out that the nexus of geekdom and parenting is a rich seam indeed. Now Ken has taken it to the ultimate degree: the book you’re reading. If only such a thing had existed three years ago when I needed it!

My own quest for the perfect Geek/Dad intersection began with LEGO Mindstorms robotics. About three years ago, my boys (then nine and six) were hugely into LEGO, while I was getting into robotics. I’d also been given an RC plane, which the boys and I had tried relatively unsuccessfully to fly. We’d also been given a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit and had dutifully made all the robots in the instruction manual and left thinking “what next?”

It was clear we were never going to be incredibly good at either LEGO Mindstorms or RC planes, given all the amazing things people could do with both, as evidenced by the videos we looked up on YouTube. And frankly, as a geek, I couldn’t see the point in doing stuff that other people had already done a lot better than we could.

But while out on a run, I got an idea. The sensors available for Mindstorms were pretty cool, including gyros, an electronic compass, and accelerometers. NXT also had a Bluetooth and was compatible with other Bluetooth devices, possibly including Bluetooth GPS modules.

What do you get when you put that all together—gyros, accelerometers, GPS, and a computer? An autopilot! If we couldn’t fly the RC planes well, maybe we could invent a robot that could. And for all the cool things that people had done with Mindstorms, the one thing nobody had done yet was to make it fly. A worthy project had arrived! We would design the world’s first LEGO Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)—a fully autonomous LEGO-piloted drone.

We started with the mechanical bits. At the time, there was no way to drive RC servos directly from Mindstorms, so we designed a sliding tray with a Mindstorms motor that slid it back and forth, and mounted the plane’s rudder servo on that. This way you’d always have RC control, but the Mindstorms controller could override it by sliding the whole servo forward and back. Likewise for turning the autopilot on and off. In the absence of an electronic link between the RC and Mindstorms worlds, we settled for a mechanical one: a servo strapped to a Mindstorms touch sensor.

Then it was time for the software. My son and I had worked on the code all weekend. It had turned out to be a perfect father-kid project: fun for him and fun for me—a meeting of child and grown-up interests turned into a fantastic weekend activity. We started with the simplest autopilot, which would use the compass sensor and just fly in a given direction for a preprogrammed length of time, then switch to another direction for another duration. That’s just the navigation part of an autopilot, however; the stabilization part would have to be covered by a commercial stabilization unit called the FMA Co-Pilot.

One flight revealed that it actually worked (more or less)—the plane navigated on its own and stayed in level flight throughout. We posted online about the project and got a huge amount of interest; the idea of a LEGO UAV was just as mind-blowing as we’d hoped. But real aerial autonomy goes a lot further than we had taken it so far: It should include latitude and longitude waypoints, and a proper autopilot should handle both navigation and stabilization. On to version 2.

This one was much more advanced. By now, thankfully, HiTechnic, a company that develops Mindstorms sensors, had gotten in touch and offered us a prototype of a device that not only allowed Mindstorms to drive RC servos directly, but also handle the autopilot on/off switching from the RC system. Others, led by Steve Hassenplug, an amateur Mindstorms guru, had figured out how to interface Bluetooth GPS modules with Mindstorms, so it was now able to use standard latitude and longitude waypoints. And HiTechnic had also made a prototype “integrating gyro” that simplified the math of working with such inertial sensors.

Combining all of those with HiTechnic’s three-axis accelerometer made the basics of a real Inertial Measurement Unit, the core of the most sophisticated autopilots in the world. But with a LEGO Mindstorms controller at the core! We mounted it in a plane, did a heap of programming, and more or less proved that it could work.

The LEGO UAV 2 flew a few times to prove the concept, then retired to a career of trade shows and the LEGO Museum in Billund, Denmark, where it is today. The kids, sadly, left the project before it was finished. By the time the code had switched to Robot C and the soldering iron had come out, we were well beyond any conceivable Geek/Dad balance. But the seed had been planted—and this was fertile soil.

The search for similar geeky projects that cut across generational appeal led me to start GeekDad. My jokey early motto was “Permission to play with cool toys isn’t the only reason to have kids, but it’s up there.” The point was to focus on the Venn intersection of geeky interests and parenting: to find cool science/tech/culture things that are fun for all generations.

I bought the domain for not much from a nice guy who wasn’t using it, and then started blogging intermittently. Then I invited friends to join me, and soon put out an open call for other geeky dads to participate.

The rest, as they say, is history. This book is what I could only dream of three years ago. My kids and I will happily dip in on weekends, picking projects that fit the time and materials we have at hand. You should do the same. It’s not meant to be read front to back. It’s a book of ideas and instructions. Skim, share with your kids, and find something that sounds like just the thing to fill a Saturday afternoon.

When you’re done, you will have had an adventure, that’s sure. But you may have also triggered a curiosity in your child that could lead to a lifetime fascination. You had such a moment when you were a kid; that’s what made you a geek at heart. This book is about opportunities to create such a moment. And to be a great parent while doing it.

Have fun!

O
nce upon a time, the word
geek
was used to describe circus performers. Then it evolved as a pejorative to describe awkward, skinny kids who got routinely thrown into school lockers by the high school football team. But these days,
geek
has reinvented itself. This is the era of the geek. And geeks are cool.

There is some interchangeability between
geek
and
nerd
. They both generally describe someone of restricted social ability who finds enjoyment in pursuits outside the mainstream—pursuits like computers, role-playing games (RPGs), science fiction and fantasy literature and movies, science and engineering, and so on—you get the idea. But there is a key difference between the geek and the nerd.

One renowned geek dad (and honorary GeekDad), Wil Wheaton, describes it pretty simply: A geek is a self-aware nerd. It makes a lot of sense to me—I think geeks had those social issues growing up and liked all those things that weren’t part of the popular culture in school, but we came to understand our nature and, in a very Kübler-Ross kind of way, moved past the self-limiting aspects of nerdhood to a state of acceptance, and even enjoyment, of our place in the universe. Which, in a funny way, helped us take care of some of those social issues, because a lot of us ended up actually getting married and having kids (which totally rocks!).

I think part of the current ascendancy of geeks in general, and GeekDads specifically, is that there are a lot more geeky women than people realize, and some of us geeky guys were smart enough to recognize our own kind and attempt to mate and perpetuate the subspecies.

But before I get too far along, let me point out something important: Geeks aren’t just about the computers and the D&D and the passion for anime and comic books. There’s a whole lot more out there that people get passionate about, even mildly obsessive about, that can qualify them as geeks. If you’re so passionate about something that you’re not just good at it but can lose yourself doing it for long periods of time (often to your social detriment), you may be a geek. If you carry encyclopedic knowledge about a topic and will joyfully use it to act as the pedant whenever the subject is being discussed, you may be a geek. If you have a room in your house devoted to a hobby that other family members avoid talking about, you may indeed be a geek. I’m not talking about “experts” or “professionals”—I’m talking about the real deal. Here are some examples:

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.