I had been a little bit wary about long summer days too hot to be outside. Are my son and I going to drive each other up the walls when our normal active life is put on hold and we spend a lot of time together indoors at home? But as it has turned out, it has been far more fun than I could have imagined to spend lots of time with my little boy in our house. We have had the chance to do things we normally do not have much time for, new arts and crafts projects, a lot of board game playing, drawing. But we have also explored the wonders of technology together.
Many kids these days seem so spend a lot of time during the holidays playing video games. For my part I am happy as long as we can avoid adding much screen time to our son’s daily life, but since we are living in a technological world (there are even TV-screens showing commercials in the toilet stalls at the local shopping mall), it has become difficult to completely avoid the allures of screens and gaming. So instead of arguing and saying no, I thought I could find a way to use screens as a fun learning experience this summer.
Kids are so creative, there is so much imagination, and so I suggested my son to use his own ideas to create our own video game! And of course he was more than happy to engage and immediately started to make a drawing of what the game should look like. While I was photographing and removing the background from the spaceships he had drawn so that we could use them in the video game, my son was starting to write down the game idea and the rules of the game. He wrote the basics and explained the rest to me as I was typing on the computer. Then we uploaded the images and the instructions to an AI app and asked it to generate a game based on our input. Several iterations later, where we asked for modifications, added music, changed the layout, we had ourselves a completely playable 10 level game with a clear gaming idea based on my son’s original image, using his drawings and rules.
It was interesting to experience our different reactions to the finished game. We both became similarly excited, but while his excitement was to be able to play a game he had created, my excitement was that we had actually been able to create this game at all (now we are already working on our second and third games). Just one year ago I could not have done this so I am blown away by the possibilities that is opening up, but for my son this AI technology is just a normal part of life, like getting water from a tap or putting groceries in the fridge to keep them cool. The speed with which AI is changing everyday life really makes me wonder what the world that my son is growing up in will look like just a few years down the road. And I have no doubt that before long it will be him helping me out with the technological aspects of life instead of the opposite.