6th Annual AVID Arcade Night

The library hosted the 6th Annual AVID Arcade last week, which is one of my favorite projects of the year. The project started years ago after I watched the short video called Caine's Arcade. The story of Caine and his arcade went viral and now there is even a Global Day of Play inspired by his story. AVID students build arcade games out of recycled materials and we host a community night every year to share our games with families and former students.

As a then teacher, and now librarian, I've always loved this project. I think it promotes 21st century student skills and a maker's culture. Students are encouraged to be creative, to work together, to think "outside of the box"- literally and figuratively, and to use trail and error thinking to continually improve on their ideas. Through the project, they take materials that would otherwise turn into waste, and make games that they then present and play with their entire families at a community night. The universality of play and arcade games spans language and cultural barriers- we always have a diverse turnout and even our parents who aren't proficient English speakers are able to come and participate. Small children come to win candy and see their big brother/sister/cousin's project and former students come to see what new designs were thought up this year.

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Our AVID teacher Robin Stone took on this project with AVID after my role changed from being the AVID teacher to coordinator. Together, we hosted a community night last week that was a huge success for our AVID students and families.

As I make moves to implement an official MakerSpace in our library (more on this in another post), I hope I can continue to use the AVID Arcade as a model maker project in our building- perhaps it will inspire other students to take on an arcade design in future years and promote student-driven creativity and ingenuity school-wide.

Thanks to Robin Stone and her 7th/8th AVID students for using the library throughout this process- it has been a blast watching these games come to life!

Check out our Instagram page- @angevinelib- for more pictures and videos from the night.