I want to point my phone at a stack of poker chips and get a total of each chip color, e.g. 132 blue chips, 54 red chips, etc. Bonus points if I can then tell the app the value of each color and get the total.
I play cash games every week and it takes the host forever to count people's chips when they want to cash out.
But, as a parent myself, I looked at it from the other end. There are only a few years left of living with my kids. I try to make the most of it every day.
Years ago, I played around with Robocode and genetic programming to "evolve" battle strategies. I was always surprised by how simple the generated winning strategies were. They were always counter intuitive.
When my daughter was in grade 5, I volunteered to teach programming for an afternoon while the teacher could do one-on-ones.
I took Robocode[1], made a basic Robot class that the kids could easily extend, and then taught them just enough logic and syntax so they could have their robots battle their classmates'.
It was a huge success. We had to close the door to the classroom because the kids were so loud, cheering their robots on.
Whenever a kid was called by the teacher to do their one-on-one, they protested "one more minute, I need to improve my robot!"
In September, my daughter starts university in software engineering; mission accomplished! ;)