This article originally appeared on Pixelkin.org, a website dedicated to covering the latest news, reviews, and developments in games—with a special focus on families.
We at LearningWorks for Kids are delighted to partner with Pixelkin to crosspost articles and share our common passion for healthy, informed family tech-time. In this post, Simone de Rochefort shows you how to play Angry Birds outside.
Summer is well on its way, and if you have gaming kids with lots of time on their hands, you might be panicking about trying to get them outside. Our friends at Engaged Family Gaming wrote a great set of instructions for making Real Life Angry Birds, so we decided to try it out here at Pixelkin!
Angry Birds is a great candidate for making a physical game. For one, it’s super simple! It only took me a couple of hours to assemble all my materials, but if you decide to go all out and decorate your cardboard boxes and balls, it could take an afternoon.
Two, it was cheap! I spent less than $20 all together. The slingshot itself, which I made with these instructions, cost less than $5. The most expensive part was the balls that I bought to represent my Angry Birds—and that was just because I bought a lot of different kinds.
Which brings us to the cool part of playing Angry Birds in real life! Since the Angry Birds game itself is based on physics, this game could be a fun little physics experiment. Talk about weight and force and what kind of ball is most effective for knocking down cardboard box towers.
Materials You’ll Need:
- 24-inch piece of 1/2-inch PVC pipe
- Handsaw or other method of cutting pipe
- Two 1/2-inch PVC 90-degree pieces (non-threaded)
- 1/2-inch T-shaped PVC piece (non-threaded)
- 1 piece of felt
- Long rubber bands
- LOTS of cardboard boxes
- As many balls as you want to launch!
That’s pretty much it! From my experiment, I learned that gluing the slingshot together is definitely a good idea. It was sturdy enough without glue until I actually started using it, and then the constant strain on it made it too loose to shoot effectively.
Smaller, hard balls work way better than big ones. But you can learn that for yourself when you and your kids test out your theories.
Here’s to a successful Angry Birds experiment!
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