Tech Camp Blog

Laser Gun Modifications

Last day at our Brockhurst Tech Camp today and the children have been adding "mods" to their laser guns. Most popular were extensions to the stocks and improvements to the sights (more aesthetic than functional, but they looked cool). I'm so often impressed by the kid's creativity, and what they can come up with given a few bits of pipe, some foam board and some glue!

The kids did quite a few other activities at this event, solving a crime using forensic techniques, and building/launching their own rockets. I spent most of the weekend mucking around with prototypes for the RC planes that we'll be building with the older kids in a couple of weeks, and adding features to the laser tag software. Over the course of the week we've really managed to improve the game play, with modes for games like 'capture the flag' and 'domination'. We can no programme the units instantly by holding a 'control box' up to them and pressing a button. This enables us to very quickly setup game parameters like game length, lives, respawn ability, etc. Now we've got these features, we've found that we've hardly used the score downloading ability at all as it always seems more fun to play the team-based games than keping track of individual's scores.