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

12 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).

1 Like
#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.

1 Like
#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!

3 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:

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#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?

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#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:

1 Like
#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

3 Likes
#9

That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing!

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#10

Thanks for sharing, this is great!

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#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

2 Likes
#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!

1 Like
#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.

1 Like
#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.

3 Likes
#17

@rymc88 We put our makecode games on an rpi3, but we didn’t use retropie. We used the following guide and it worked well - we didn’t have a Joy Bonnet so we just created our own arcade.cfg filed.

Best thing is you can copy over new/updated games just by plugging a USB cable into RPI and dragging over the game’s UF2 file!

I would really like to configure the rpi with dual boot so our students could reset the cabinet to play with retropie games or makecode games.

Would you mind sharing your cabinet plans? Our setup is just tucked behind a monitor right now and it’d be great if it was in a standing cabinet.

1 Like
#18

Thank you you for sharing and I like the idea of the dual boot. These are not my plans, but they are the ones I used to build the tabletop cabinet. The link is to TheWoodWhisperer who has free plans and a video to go along.

TheWoodWhisperer - Arcade Plans

1 Like
#19

We also have some (not so great) plans on building a wooden cabinet -> MakeCode Arcade Wooden Cabinet.

The thing is that for a cabinet, you’ll probably need a few power tools and the person who owns those tools can build that cabinet without blueprints.

2 Likes
#20

Thanks for sharing. I have a wood working neighbor, so I’ll see if he’s interested in a collaboration :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

1 Like
#21

Hi @rymc88 and @techahoynyc,

Maybe it would be possible to combine the MakeCode Arcade games with RetroPie in your projects with this?:

Br,
Vegard

5 Likes