During the last year with PowerHouse Systems, my family and I were traveling a great deal. This was hard on my son most of all and I was trying to find a way reconnect with him. Since we homeschool, I had some freedom to come up with just about anything. After discussing things with my wife and some of her friends I designed a class I called “Man Skills.” This class met for 4 hours once a week and we went over all sorts of stuff that you should know to be a man. We covered a range of topics from the behavioral to the practical, such as how cars work, how electricity works and woodworking.

Once we got through most of those items we moved into computer skills, which every kid loves including Photoshop, digital photography, 3D modeling and Game Development. We used GameMaker for game development because one of the kids already had experience with it. We built top-down shooters and platform games as part of the class and for a challenge we built a Flappy Bird clone in two hours one day. The boys loved it and I had a great time teaching them. It was challenging work for 12 year olds.

Overall Man Skills was a very successful class. We're hoping to do a future installment.