Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

I have not seen my grandkids in a couple of weeks.  With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, we do not know when we will get together again.  We do video connections and those are great, but what happens when your five-year-old grandson wants to play Battleship?  He has the real game, and when we visit him, we play face-to-face. But I do not have the real game. I had it when I was a kid, but that was a long time ago.

Once again, Legos came to my rescue.  I made a 20×20 square. I had enough blue bricks for the whole thing.  It makes it look a little more like water. So a 2×2 square is equivalent to one square of the regular game.  Using Google Docs, I created a Battleship grid and sized it so the squares were the same size as the 2×2 squares.  I printed a couple before I got the size exactly right. I used the extras, with red and green pencils, as my score sheets.

Using an Exacto knife, Mrs. Trusty cut out the paper grid so I could place my Lego ocean in the middle of the page.  This made it easier to see the numbers and letters on the edges.

Below are all the pieces needed after you have the board. The blue pieces are the footprints of the ships. You can built on top of those footprints as creatively as you like. The seventeen red pieces are used to mark the hits on your fleet.

I sat a laptop on the floor and connected with Noah.  Actually, I connected with my daughter and Noah joined in as soon as he saw me.  When I had a miss (I had eleven before the first hit), I marked a green circle. Finally, I got a hit and I marked it with a red X. When I finally sank a ship, I outlined the X’s in red in the shape of that ship.

I tried to make my ships look as real as I could, but I do have a limited number of Legos.  I held each one up to the camera and showed Noah, so he knew what he was targeting. We would call out our shots with animal names for the letters. Hippo Eight! When Noah had a hit, I put a red 1×2 brick on the ship.  Of course, the first one Noah sank was my battleship.

We had a blast!  After I won the first game, Noah said, “I had a good strategy.”  I was surprised that a five-year-old knew that word. Eventually my luck overcame his strategy.  We plan to play often. I predict he will win a few before I get lucky again.