School Project: The Map Of Doom

So the boys are out of school today, and Firstborn has a project due Thursday. I am determined to have this project finished, y'know, today.

The assignment is to read a book involving a journey -- they're reading The Hobbit in his class -- and then create some sort of interactive 3D map, which he can use to give a presentation. Now, I had ideas for how we might approach this. I favored using Martha Wells' excellent The Cloud Roads, in no small part because the book doesn't include a map of its own. So on the one hand, we'd have to build the map based on the text, and on the other hand there wouldn't really be any wrong way to do it. Plus, it would have been fun to build some of the locations in that book.

But Firstborn had decided to work from one of his Minecraft books, specifically the one that's... I don't know... number fifteen or sixteen in a series. So I committed myself to reading it. And it's... To be fair, I can see why he enjoyed it. But the books are intensely first-person stream of consciousness, so there's probably two pages of explanation/digression for every page of plot advancement. Plus, the author is clearly writing a serial: the individual books aren't very long, but they're part of a single, unbroken storyline. The result of these two factors is that the book I read simply didn't have enough locations (or events, for that matter) to fill in the required Seven Important Locations that we needed for the map.

Y'all, I have now read four of these books, digressions and all.

But we have now gotten enough information together to start building the map. We're building it in layers, out of cardboard, so that each location will be a little cut-out square that you can lift up to see information about why it's important and what happens there. This will involve spray paint, and white glue, and printing relevant text in blocks that will fit underneath the removable squares. It will absolutely not strain my concentration to the breaking point or leave me frustrated, drained, and questioning my worth as a parent and as a human being in general.

But just in case, send more whiskey.