So, the game of life now has a better explosion. Took more time to do this than any of the other features, but my son's gleeful giggle upon seeing it made it worth it.
First I just set it up to send all the currently "on" squares radially outward (actually I think it was/is a little more complex than that--they go out in such a way that everything gets to the outside at the same time). I had to struggle with it for quite a while until I figured out that Director was doing something weird when you called "mod" against floating point numbers. Anyway, when I finally got it all worked out, the explosion was disappointingly mundane. So I added a couple of rings around the center so there's always something to explode, and voila! giggles.