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Quick, Draw!

Quick, Draw! gives you a word — bicycle, owl, the Eiffel Tower — and twenty seconds to draw it while a neural network tries to guess what it is, saying its guesses aloud as you go. Six drawings make a round, and at the end you can see which ones the machine recognised and how other people drew the same thing. Google’s Creative Lab released it in 2016 as an experiment in machine learning, and the drawings players made were later published as an open dataset. It is Pictionary with a guesser who never gets bored. Children from five or six love it, and it needs no account. The drawbacks are practical: drawing with a mouse is clumsy, so a tablet or touchscreen helps, and the twenty-second limit can upset careful young artists.

Reference source: Official site (quickdraw.withgoogle.com) (external link, opens in a new tab).

Quick, Draw!: a quick pencil sketch of a cat on a yellow card
A parent and a child laughing at a Bristol kitchen table while they play a game together on a tablet

Draw the Obvious Part

A round of six drawings takes about three minutes. Draw the one feature everyone would recognise first — a rabbit’s ears, a bicycle’s wheels — and add detail only if the machine is still guessing. Simple, large shapes beat careful small ones. For families, take turns at the screen and let the rest of the room shout guesses too; it becomes a race between the people and the computer.

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Smiling clay sun mascot with small arms and legs, holding a paintbrush

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