Caine’s Arcade inspired classrooms across the world to value and foster the creativity inherent in all of our children. Similarly, the Hour of Code has inspired millions of children to learn the basics of computer programming.

Why not combine them?

For this year’s Hour of Code, students in my class took their coded video games (Made largely on Code.org – Check out this resource) and ran with their own idea that their iPads could be the screens in their own arcade.

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Classes came in droves to check out what the kids had put together. Each student was given 3 tokens. When a student won a ticket, they could exchange the ticket for another token.
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The games were very simple to play, but challenging at first to code. Students used Seesaw to keep all of their links as they coded multiple video games for the arcade over the course of the year.
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Cardboard was collected from the students’ homes. This machine had a kid in it who distributed tickets and collected tokens.
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Another creative idea that the students pursued was the iPad movie theatre. Students cut holes in boxes to create a dark room for viewing movies and videos.
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Many of the games were unplayable right up until the final days before the arcade opened. Students refined and improved their games to make them both fun and challenging.
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Younger students in the school were helped by the Year 5 class to understand the token and ticketing system that they had created.
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Many parents and teachers were impressed with the arcade the students made.
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Some students contributed physical play games in addition to their coded video games.
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The event proved to be so popular that the students had a hard time keeping up with the demand for fun!

What do you think? Was this the first event of its kind, or have you seen this made before? Comment below, and keep coming back to read more posts on educationrickshaw.com.

Published by educationrickshaw

International Teaching in Motion

12 thoughts on “Hour of Code + Caine’s Arcade Brings Creative Computer Science to Sudan”

  1. Amazing!! Can you explain how you kept links on Seesaw? (We use Seesaw already.) This is really fabulous! We are starting Genius Hoir after the holidays and just finished up doing Hour of Code coding this week (except for the 2 snow days we had). I was going to show kids Caine’s Arcade for inspiration. I will show them this as well! Thanks for sharing!

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    1. Thanks! So after the kids finished each of their coding projects on Code.org, we discovered that many would give a unique shareable link that would take you to their coded game. I just created a folder for coding on Seesaw and had students post their links using the link tool. When the arcade came around, all they had to do was open up their folder full of coded games and ask visitors what game they wanted to play out of the list of games they had available

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    1. Thanks so much! Yes it was a really fun event that had the whole community coming in and trying out their games. Although they had been coding for the whole year independently during their centers times, we only really spent about a week putting the whole thing together as a group. Fun times 🙂

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    1. I think it was JavaScript, but these programs for kids (I used code.org and a little bit of the Tinker app) really scaffold the concepts by having students build up from very simple blocks to more complex ones. A lot of it was just exposure to the whole idea of the block-based coding vs. “what is under the hood” real code.

      Zach

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