Brad’s Sketchpad

A few years ago, my friend (and now colleague) Matt Richtel suggested we teach a writing class at the local pirate store, 826 Valencia, which doubles as an after-school study center for young students. It was tremendously fun and inspiring, and since then we’ve guided several groups of eager, sometimes hyperactive, 10 and 11 year olds in writing memoirs, mysteries and sci-fi adventures. Last spring, we tried a class in writing comic strips. This fall, we got even more experimental– video game writing.

We had about a dozen boys (the girls all fled, for some reason) and designed the game as a group. The biggest challenge was getting their young minds to think not about gory 3D shoot-em-up but about a text-based maze, similar to the old Choose-Your-Own Adventure books. To break things up, we had our students illustrate the various scenes.

It wouldn’t have gone any farther, if it wasn’t for our mutual friend, Fred Sharples of San Francisco’s Orange Design. Fred co-taught the class with us and afterward took all the material and created an actual game. We posted the game on the 826 site, and you can actually play it here.

Have fun. We did.

For the last month, I’ve been learning the ropes at the New York Times. I wrote or cowrote a few stories along the way, including one on the marked increase in spam, and on eBay’s decision to close its site in China.

In more important news, Jen has been named the sexiest geek of 2006 by Violet Blue on her Tiny Nibbles blog!