Stop the Grinch from reaching Santa!
We love to build fun things and for this Christmas season, we spent a couple of hours creating this holiday-themed Laser Blaster game.
How the gameplay works: Squeeze the trigger on the gun to start the game. The Grinch will move around the Earth to catch santa. Shoot all three of his evil elves before the Grinch reaches Santa. View the number of shots, your accuracy, and your time on the LCD screen.
Here is how we made the game. We purchased a toy gun at the dollar store and hacked it with a few pieces of Smartware to turn it into our Laser Blaster.
Taking apart the toy gun and installing our Pushbutton Smartware in back of the trigger mechanism. We used flush cutters to snip away at the plastic to make room for the pushbutton.
Our Laser Pointer Smartware.
We used an LCD Smartware to display shots taken and number of hits. Looks like we can use some practice!
Adding fun sounds with our Speaker Smartware.
Everything uses plug and play connectors to the Brain Block.
A piece of foam keeps the Laser Smartware centered in the barrel of the gun.
We printed pictures of the Grinch, Elves, Santa, and the Earth and glued them to cardboard cutouts. We made a rotating arm to move the Grinch around the “world” using a Servo Smartware, a piece of coat-hanger wire, and some hot-glue.
Each evil elf has a Light Sensor Smartware to detect laser hits.
Our finished setup.
We crafted the program using our visual programming language.
A close up of the firing sequence for the gun in our visual program.
Having fun! The gun and target communicate with each other wirelessly via the built-in bluetooth on each Brain Block.
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