Cardboard Arcade using MaKey MaKey & Scratch

This beautiful video tells the story of Caine's Arcade.  Caine Monroy is a nine year old from Southern California who spent his summer vacation building a cardboard arcade inside his dad's used auto parts store.  He had a hard time getting anyone to play his games, until one day when Nirvan Mullick happened to walk in and buy a Fun Pass.

Recently, inspired by Caine and his arcade, BPC's 7th grade students designed, built, and shared their own cardboard arcade creations.  We were able to add a bit of technology to the challenge, using Scratch for programming and MaKey MaKeys to incorporate some simple circuitry and provide input to the Scratch program.  BPC students from grades K - 6 were invited to come over and play!

Here is a brief highlight reel.  You can read more about our project (including the lesson plans) on Mytko's Post-its and Ponderings blog post.

More photos:

 

BPC Students' Entry in the White House Student Film Festival

Last month, 7th grade students Daniel, Jane, Abe, Flynn and Alexander collaborated on producing an entry for the first ever White House Student Film Festival.  Their task was to "highlight the power of technology in schools."  These BPC 7th graders created their film entirely on their own, without any adult intervention - from conception to writing the scripts, and filming through editing, and even composing all of the music you hear in the background.

The White House committee had a tough job whittling down the over 2500 submissions down to 16 finalists.  While our BPC's students' entry was not ultimately selected, the kids' final product was a nice showcase of the work the 7th grade has been doing with 3D printing this year.  Congrats to all of these students for a job well done!

You can watch President Obama's opening remarks from yesterday's event in the video below, and see all 16 finalists' films on the White House Film Festival page.  There are some extraordinary stories represented and all the films are well worth watching.