Arcade Machine

We’re building an Arcade Machine at Make Club. I love playing old arcade games, and I thought it would be a great project to get the kids’ help with. It combines woodwork, computing and electronics in a fun package!

Focusing on the woodworking side of things, we decided to get the kids and parents building small-scale models of the arcade cabinet. The outcome we were aiming for was for everyone to get a sense of the shape of the end product. We had handouts with 1:5 scale layout of the panels as well as side-profile cut-out showing how the panels fit together.

The kids and parents got to work in 5 teams, using the layout as stencils and cutting out the panels from corrugated cardboard. Then, panel-by-panel the teams assembled their models, decorating them creatively at the end. We also had a joystick and 10 buttons wired up in a shoebox controller prototype, and the kids used that in their design of their buttons and joysticks.

As expected, we all got a sense of what the end cabinet would be like, along with a few unanticipated things we learnt:

Figuring out how the panels fit together will actually make building the real thing easier. Getting the front and marquee panels in the right places proved tricky for a few teams, so referencing the side-profile was required.

The end product will be big! We had a full size panel for the controls and comparing that to the size of the models’ control panel caused a few “wows” from the kids.
 

The feedback we got was that the kids loved it! I saw a model being carried around by one of the girls at school the next day, and that made me smile.