Corbin's Spatial Relations Training

Corbin loves playing Portal 2, which he calls "The Robot Game," with Daddy.  Daddy tried to play the game's co-op mode with Mommy, but it made Mommy want to die.  So Daddy has been waiting for Corbin to get old enough to where he would be able to help Daddy play through the co-op mode (in which you play as two cute robots who get instantly reassembled anytime they "die") and he finally is.  We were able to beat the rather challenging co-op campaign together about three weeks ago.

So now Corbin is continuing to work his way through the single player campaign, solo.  I have been increasingly impressed with his ability to solve the game's "test chambers" by manipulating buttons, catching and throwing cubes, redirecting lasers, and flinging himself through linked, momentum conserving quantum portals (from whence the game takes its name).

Well, to my surprise and delight, I saw Corbin puzzling and probing his way through one of the more challenging chambers in the game--one that actually stumped me to the point where I had to take a break and come back another day to finish it--when all of a sudden he got it.  He was pulling off some really quite remarkable feats of spatial reasoning that I was so impressed and proud to witness that I had to take his controller, undo all of his work, and make him do it over again so I could catch it on video.  I apologize for our screwball microphone and the static it produces for the first 30-seconds or so, but it clears up after that.  Behold, the puzzle-solving prowess of a 4 1/2 year old:

He is his father's son.

This Portal game has actually become something of a pop-culture phenomenon, with legion internet memes, bumper stickers, and other references popping up in an ever broadening range of places.  But one of the favorite Portal productions I've seen recently is this delightful music video, which also gives a fairly good overview of the Portal-verse (Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science; GlaDOS, the homicidal AI running the facility; Wheately, the bumbling "intelligence" core trying to help the player escape; and the cuddly Aperture turrets with their sweet, robot voices and deadly machineguns).  It pays homage to the catchy "This is Halloween" song from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, and was written, animated, and edited by an "amateur" (his very modest description) animator in the UK.  He posted the video on YouTube in January and it already has almost 2,300,000 views.  I hope you enjoy "This is Aperture!"