A Small Moment: Crayon Physics

This morning I experienced a real treat: I planned to play some games with the kids, and they didn't exactly want to do what I expected, but it provided a few pleasant moments. Then a few minutes later I sat down at the computer for a minute to play Crayon Physics; this is a marvelous little game where you draw shapes and they fall, roll, and bounce off each other as if they were physical objects. You should try it out.

Well, the last screen gives you a flat area without any objective, so I decided to try a few things like balancing blocks and seeing how high I could stack them. So I called Ella over and challenged her to a contest: let's see who can stack the most blocks on a teeter-totter. We stacked them, balanced them, drew tiny ones, made mounds of the tiny ones, exploded mounds of tiny ones (by drawing large items in the middle of the ground, which pops them up rapidly)... It was a good time. She even tried to make a house, which is hard when there's almost no friction!

After it was over, I realized that we had just shared a small, special moment where we both played at something, we each enjoyed it, and it even included some eye-opening discoveries for both of us.

How cool is that?

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PS: If you can't find the game, try this link.

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Exercises to try:

- Plan your next time to play on someone else's schedule, doing their interests (for at least 30 minutes).
- What kind of open-ended play do you have available around the house/yard/workplace?