Microsoft MakeCode

Remote Code Club

Arcade
#1

Hi all,

I just wanted to say thank you to all the team behind MakeCode Arcade. In my school we have an after school Code Club every week and we have used several platforms over the years, but MakeCode Arcade has become the favorite one for the students. We usually display their work in a Raspberry Pi in the school’s hallway, so everybody can play. These days we are still meeting remotely and, since we can’t get to the school, we created a website to display the games they are creating. I leave it here.

Thanks again for your work and creativity.

Best,

Adrian

9 Likes
#2

Wow, your students have been busy. It’s great to see the gallery that showcases their games!

Could you share a pic of your rpi arcade box? (when you’re back to the school).

#3

Thanks, Peli! They are very proud of their work and very motivated :smile:

We actually don’t have an arcade box (yet; I’d love to build one). We just have a rpi 3 with a touchscreen and a NES type USB controller mapped to the right keys. Until January we had been mainly doing Scratch and we were using it for that. Maybe over the summer I will build one. I have seen some of the great ones people have posted here and I am getting ideas.

#4

Hey Adrian

Really enjoyed seeing what you’re doing for your code club. Building a website and having a RPi 3 for the kids is an awesome idea, I’d love to try it! I’m a bit like you in that I ran a code club for primary aged kids until schools closed. I recently discovered MakeCode as well and it has really impressed me. I will definitely be showing it to my code club. My students are more familiar with Scratch so I’ve made them some guides to follow, feel free to take a look and pass them on to your kids if you like.

Keep up the awesome work!

2 Likes
#5

Wow, the documentation of those projects is incredible! Thank you so much for sharing. We will be doing a summer coding program in the school and I’ll use some of those. I wish now I’d documented my projects too! Here are the ones we’ve been doing remotely in arcade.

Again, thanks for sharing! I really appreciate it. :blush:

#6

No problem at all. I spent hours making those resources during lockdown and I don’t think many of my students are using them. How are you doing remote learning?

#7

They really look great! I’m doing zoom meetings twice a week and then we have a Google classroom where we also interact. My club size is pretty managable. I usually have around 10 kids. We are a very small school in a small town in Maine :smile:

#8

If you’re looking to build a very cute arcade table, the easiest way so far is starting from a kid IKEA table --> https://arcade.makecode.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/ikea-flisat-table

2 Likes
#9

That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing!

1 Like
#10

Thanks for sharing, this is great!

1 Like
#11

Thank you! May I remix your website idea for my classes? The embed of Arcade game is so great! I will share the link to our site once we have student work published in the next few weeks. We (6th and 7th graders) are doing projects on Arcade, micro:bit, CoSpacesEDU, Blender and Virtual Tour Creator, all done remotely this term.
Cheers, Jennifer

1 Like
#13

Hey Adriana,

Are you loading makecode games to the rpi 3? If so, I would be interested in finding out how. I had students build a tabletop arcade cabinet for woodshop and it ran on rpi 3 with retropie. The kids did the wiring and everything, but the games that were on the rpi 3 were game-roms. What I would love to be able to load student games onto the retropie and have a completely school arcade. If you have arcade cabinet plans if you are interested in building your own.

#14

Thank you, Jennifer! Of course you can! It’ll be great to see what they create!

#15

Here is out site…a few stragglers to add, but most are there. We gave students the choice to build in Arcade, Microbit, CoSpaces, and some other mediums of choice. https://sites.google.com/oes.edu/mstechnologyrotation/home

PS 99% of student work done with iPad as we are 1:1 iOS in Middle School. Virtual Tour Creator and Blender were a couple of exceptions.

#16

Very cool! I am currently working on a tool to help with recording high quality streams of arcade games. You can try a preview here at https://makecode.com/streamer . It might help your students.

1 Like