My lovely wife is out doing last minute Christmas shopping and I’m home with the kids. While it would certainly be easy to just let them play video games all day, I like to challenge them to look beyond their surroundings and think. To do that, requires a fun puzzle, and I’ve been doing this one for a couple of years and they love it. In fact they love it so much that they requested I do it again this morning.
I’ve dubbed it “Moneyhunt”, which is a variation on a treasure hunt, and it is simple and easy for me, but for them, not so much… and that’s the attraction that gets them off the computer games and using skills of observation. I thought it worth sharing, so here’s how I do it.
What I do is take a selection of loose change, typically $1 exactly for each child, and hide it around the house in places that they’d never think to look. I also make good use of camouflage as shown in the picture below:
The trick is to place coins in places that aren’t on regular household surfaces, and to put shiny coins of like diameter on shiny objects that hide them. Darker coins like old pennies go into nooks on darker furniture. Making the coin look like part of the object is key to making it challenging.
I also put coins on top of doorknobs, tape them to the sides and bottoms of tables, and put them in the sea of refrigerator magnets with double sided sticky tape and a small magnet.
I’m still trying to figure out how to hide money on Tubbycat without waking him up:
By making sure you know the exact amount of coinage (in today’s case $2) the kids know just by counting the coins they have collected if they found them all. That last penny is usually particularly frustrating.
If you aren’t a parent, this little game works great for grandparents too.
Next year, since Al Gore’s warmer cronies say I’m apparently flush with cash reaching into the billions, I’m going to put out pure gold and silver coins and hide some gold bullion in the freezer. /sarc Yeah, that should be fun.
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Every April Fool’s Day, the new guy in the office gets pranked by me with a related Hide and Seek game. I have an old ten-count box of 3.5 inch floppies, where each floppy is labeled numerically in sequence, 1, 2, 3, … 10. I then “hide” the floppies in plane sight in the victim’s cubical with the empty box sitting next to the keyboard. When the victim arrives, he sees the box and the first few floppies, and starts the collection process. The game usually lasts about 10 minutes. The entertaining part is that there really are only 9 floppies. Number 7 in the series is missing. But the box holds ten floppies, and the victim finds 1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9, and 10 within a few minutes, so the victim just keeps on looking for the “missing” floppy. (^_^)
As a side note, I have come to notice that the response to “game” contains interesting insights into our new comrade’s disposition. Some continue looking for up to half an hour before I have to stop the game, usually because I can hear furniture being moved. We keep these guys at arms length. Most give up after ten minutes and then admit that they can’t find the “missing” floppy. The look on their face when I finally inform them that there is no number 7 floppy is usually priceless. But a very few stop looking after only a few minutes, as they realize that the joke isn’t the floppies splattered all over the cubical, but that there is a missing floppy. These guys are always very clever, turn out to be the best of friends, and usually exact minor retribution in the coming months. I look forward to the challenges …
Happy New Year!