The Circuit Has Closed

The Heathcote Arcade has come to an end. We (as a class) have worked so hard and and have built it up from nothing.  Making final touches to present it at the HExpo (Heathcote’s Maker Fair) has been stressful, but incredible to see it all come together. Our class basically separated into 3 parts towards the deadline when everything needed to function properly, be finished and ready to be used. The 4 parts were: Technology – Where people worked on The Heathcote Arcade Website (check it out at http://heathcotearcade.weebly.com!), Scratch, and Tinkercad. Art – Making signs to advertise the arcade and the games, also making finishing touches to the games. Building – making sure all of the games work properly, adding on to the games to make them a huge success (which they were!), and of course bossing the people in “the art department” around by telling them exactly what they want them to do, and telling them, “DON’T MESS UP!” There was also a group that was in both the building and art group, they were the ones who made prizes. I think I was in all the groups because I made prizes, I helped build games, I made signs for games, and I used Tinkercad too!

Now the hard part comes, what do we do with the arcade?  Today we had a discussion about it, and we thought that we could leave it for the incoming 5th graders next year, or maybe we could teach kids what we learned from this. Also, we could make an arcade club where we teach other kids how to make one and you would be able to make your own arcade games! Another idea was, “why don’t we just do it one more time?” This idea was a little ambitious but I’m sure we could make it happen. As all these ideas piled up, it just got more unclear on what to do next.

This experience opened up so many new doors for me, and I feel so proud about what we have done. The collaboration and creativity put into this, according to teachers was very sophisticated. Even though our classroom was extremely messy over this period of time, I am 100% sure it was worth it!

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