Glow Hockey

Glow hockey is a super fun game that was inspired by one of our little visitors a few weeks ago. Within minutes of seeing the light table and some crystal climbers Clara joyfully rallied us all together to play a game of glow hockey. Pretty smart for a seven year old! Clara’s idea was to use the small cylinders for puck launchers and the disks for pucks. The only flaw in her game was the fact that the cylinders made a horrid screeching sound as the launchers moved across the table. To remedy the problem I came up with this solution:

Materials: Four round cylinders, rubber bands, felt and four flat disks.

Puck launchers: I cut the felt into squares to fit the cylinders then attached them with several rubber bands and voila! no squeaky sound. 

Our play: This was the first time we were experimenting with this game and we had plenty of things to figure out. It was tricky for the kids to launch the pucks all the way across the table so our work mostly consisted of learning how to use enough force to launch the pucks. Once we figured that out, we had to come up with some rules for fair play but I wanted this to be the kids game so I left that part up to them. 

As we played some problems and disputes arose that inspired the rules for our game such as:

1.) No keeping all the pucks to yourself because everyone else wants to play too. (Logan)

2.) Keep your hands off the table while other people are playing or your fingers will get smashed. (Will)

3.) Do not launch pucks at each other’s faces because taking a puck to the face hurts. (Sam)

4.) It’s not nice to call other people “losers” because it can hurt their feelings, besides we don’t have any points yet so nobody can lose. (Ms. Geraldine)

Things we learned through play:

Visual tracking

Fine motor skills

Hand / eye coordination

Impulse control / turn taking

Innovative use of materials

Creative problem solving

How to develop rules so everyone can have fun