TechShop and CodaKid Minecraft Code-A-Thon in Chandler

Here's some interesting photos of a recent trip to the TechShop in Chandler, AZ for a CodaKid Code-A-Thon teaching kids coding for Minecraft. 

This is a chess set made there using 3D printing

View of the code-a-thon in progress

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Minecraft Perler Bead figures

Minecraft is another favorite at our house and the kids love to play with these Minecraft figures we made.

These are Steve, a Creeper, a pig and a sheep. you can see on the creeper I ironed it a bit longer to make the beads more square and that also flattened the figure to be thinner. 

They also love these little diamond swords, emerald and heart. The Emerald is also from Minecraft. The heart is just something fun we designed. 

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Minecraft inspired tooth fairy pillows

Our son lost his first tooth this year and wanted very specific Tooth Fairy Pillows. He asked for an Enderman (from Minecraft) and a Creeper (also from Minecraft). I looked around on Pinterest and didn't really find anything so we decided to try to make them out of felt.

We found an image of a cartoon Enderman online and then modeled our pillow after it. We cut out all the shapes just by eye using fabric scissors and then glued them together with a hot glue gun. To make it a pillow I cut out a rectangle for the back that was as large as the front and only glued three edges. I filled it with cotton balls (we didn't have any other filling at the time) and then glued the fourth side shut. To make the pocket for the tooth we just glued a black panel 3/4 of the length of the front to the figure and glued it on 3 sides only, leaving the top open. You could also choose to leave the purple mouth as the pocket. 

For his second tooth (that is still wiggly but we are all set for the Tooth Fairy) he chose the Creeper. 

Here is what was left of our felt after cutting out the pieces we needed. We really just tried to follow some cartoon images of Minecraft characters we found online and worked together. My son is 6 years old so he is old enough to help with some of the cutting and gluing and decision making for projects. 

Here is our stack of felt - we bought it on Amazon in a multi-pack for around $11 (here is my affliate link to some of the assorted color variety packs from $7 - $10 on Amazon). Ours included at least one sheet of glittery purple felt which was a big hit. We bought this in the spring of this year.

This is our glue gun which is pretty ancient. It was mine as a child and still works. These are some of our fabric scissors but any good sharp scissors will work, just watch your fingers.

Here is the finished Creeper pillow. The pocket for the tooth is pretty small on this one and is 

the black mouth that looks like an upside down "U."

These little guys sit on the bookshelf in the kids' room eagerly awaiting the next chance to meet the tooth fairy and deliver some money to our boys in the morning. 

(This was not a sponsored post but I have an affiliate account with Amazon so if you decide to purchase any of these items through my link a small commission will be paid to our family to help keep the blog going and pay for the boys' Montessori tuition.)