Gamifying Vacation

I recently went on a vacation with my family that took us across the globe. It was exciting for all of us but my kids, in particular, were absolutely stoked. It would mean a lot of new things for them, including seeing the sights, eating new foods, and interacting with new people. While these are all the reasons why I wanted to go on this trip, I can see why my kids might have a little anxiety about getting catapulted way outside of their comfort zone.

We—a family from north-eastern USA—were traveling to Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan, and while my kids are familiar with Malaysian and Japanese food, we knew that there would be a few foods we wanted them to experience, we wanted them to get to know the language and the cultures, and we wanted them to be motivated to be in their best behavior.

During summer break our kids go to a summer camp that has a reward system for kids that show kindness and maturity or push themselves out of their comfort zones. They give kids a lanyard with a keyring on it at the beginning of the summer and as the kids earn their rewards they are presented with a colorful keyring tag that has a unique label and an illustration for each reward. For example, the kids will get tags for their first time swimming, hitting the target in archery, and doing the ropes course. They also have tags for behaviors, like sharing, being honest, and winning competitions. The tags are presented to the kids in a weekly “Tag Ceremony” put on by the counselors.

My kids are proud when they receive a tag. It motivates them to do their best to receive more tags and they are psyched to let us know what new tags they've earned each week.

A week or so before our trip, my kids were sharing with us the news about the tags they just received and I just threw the idea out there to my kids that wouldn’t it be fun to get a tag for trying durian or sushi on the trip? They both got excited about the idea and I told them that—no promises but—I would look for some tags I could write on during the plane ride and we’d come up with some that they could earn.

With just a few days to spare I went with the quickest route to getting some blank tags that would work for our purpose. I wound up placing an order for a box of translucent tags on Amazon. To be honest, I went with the translucent color because I thought it would look cool, but I think the white or one of the other colors would have worked better. The problem with the translucent background is it made a stack of tags on a keyring harder to read.

These tags were a little smaller than the tags the kids get from camp, but they were very similar in shape and size. We found a couple of key rings around the house that fit the tiny holes in the tags. I would up using a fine-point Sharpie and wrote on the tags by hand—sloppy handwriting be damned.

To organize myself ahead of time I came up with a list of all of the rewards that could be earned on the trip. I used Affinity Publisher to whip together a page that I could print out, cut in half, then put in my kid’s travel backpacks. This page would outline what is required to earn a particular tag as both a reminder to myself and to help make sure the kids knew the rules up front.

The blank tags came in a little ziplock bag so after I wrote up all the tags I put them all in that bag and put it in my travel bag.

Throughout the vacation I would give the kids a heads up, like letting them know we’ll be going to a seafood restaurant and they had a good chance of getting a shrimp or crab tag. At the end of the day for each day of our vacation we did our own tag ceremony and I presented the kids with their new tags.

My kids each have a hand-me-down iPad that we brought on the trip to give them something to do on the long flights. Kids being kids, instead of looking for fun ways to entertain themselves in our homestays and hotels they constantly asked to play games on their iPads whenever we seemed to have a moment of downtime. Instead of constantly telling them “no”, I eventually told them that if they can go the rest of the trip—outside of plane rides—without turning on their iPads I would give them a special, golden tag as a reward.

I can’t say I expected anything to come out of this, but it worked (with some really minor exceptions that we let go by). For the most part they stayed off their devices without us having to tell them. The only thing they used their iPads for were to take videos and photos, and that was something we encouraged them to do.

So anyway, we got back home and now I needed to come up with whatever this golden tag would look like 🤔

I used Fusion 360 to create a blank tag. To do this I measured the current tags (at 5mm x 3mm) and measured the distance from the keyring hole from the edge. In Fusion I put together a sketch and modeled out the based of the tag, added a border, and room for the keyring hole.

Fusion 360 lets you add text, but the slicer software I use for my 3D printer, Bambu Slicer, also lets you add text to a model. It was simpler to create the tags as blank in Fusion, bring the STL file from that into the slicer, add the text to one of the tiles, then duplicate that one tile to modify the text from there.

I created an iPad Dust Collector tag and let the printer do its thing. I used Prusa’s awesomely named Oh My Gold PLA filament with Bambu’s default print settings (along with the PLA profile I added to the slicer for the non-Bambu PLA).

While I had done most of the work anyway, I put a couple of colors on my AMS and created tags with my kids names on them just for fun. The slicer lets you start with one color and then swap out the color at a certain layer, so I picked the layer after the base was printed in gold to start the color for the text and the border.

I uploaded the model for the blank tags onto Prusa’s Printables website. There are other similar tags on the website, but if you have a 3D printer and wanted to follow along my process here, the model is free to use.

My kids didn’t earn all of the available tags but they earned most of them and they truly tried their best. I’m so damn proud of them for trying different foods (and actually liking them!), for sticking with us on some long hikes, and for learning some words in the local language and speaking them to strangers (like telling the cook ”thank you“ in Malay on the way out of a restaurant).

I don’t know that we'll use this whole tag setup on future trips, but my kids are at the right age right now where this got them excited for this one vacation and it added a lot to the memories for them and for me.