Erik Lokensgard, Author at Writing in the Stream

This is a game inspired by William Steig’s Five Lines game that he’d play with his kids. Now you can play it with your friends anywhere in the world!

Updated version here!: https://writinginthestream.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/daily-squiggle2-21-26-11-43.html

The goal is to use the random five squiggles as starting guidelines to draw a face. You can add as many lines as you’d like!

Then, if you’d like, you can share your creation with a friend and challenge them to make a face too! After they make their own, they can see yours!

If you have a favorite, you can vote for it. Check back another day for a new set of lines.

Transparency: I have been dreaming about making something like this for a long time. However, I didn’t have the coding chops to do it. Recently, I realized that Gemini does. So I used Gemini to help me code it, inspired by Alex Dobrenko. It’s really quite amazing what you can build now.

Older versions of the game:

2/21/26: Making the random squiggles black instead of grey, and the user’s squiggles grey instead of black. Thanks to Steve Allen and Joe Allen for their suggestion. Thanks also to Steve for suggesting an undo button, a zoom feature (not yet implemented), and the ability to go to the review without resubmitting: https://writinginthestream.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/daily-squiggle2-21-26-11-29.html

2/20/26PM: https://writinginthestream.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/daily-squiggle2-20-26-12-04.html

2/20/26AM: https://writinginthestream.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/daily-squiggle2-20-26.html

2/19/26: https://writinginthestream.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/daily-squiggle.html

Here are two games that should work great for getting students to think and have fun when they are developing their intuition about angles.

Click the picture above to open Guess the Angle in a new tab, full screen. The game allows for up to six teams. The closest guess wins 2 points, any guess within the adjustable tolerance wins 1 point. (You might have noticed that the second team name in the screenshot makes more sense as Tau than Tao. 🌊 The typo is now corrected in the game itself.)

The second geometry team game has two modes. The first mode is just to get them thinking about supplementary and complementary angles. The second mode is for students to also brush off their algebra skills!