The Lockport Arcade

The Lockport Arcade is a student-built arcade machine. It is a custom wooden cabinet with a joystick and buttons, running a library of original video games, with a soundtrack of original sound effects—designed and built by students at Lockport High School in collaboration with their teachers and researchers at the University at Buffalo.

The Lockport Arcade was built by students across four different disciplines:

• Introductory CS students taking the Making With Code games unit wrote the games. For many of them, this was one of their first experiences with programming. Their games run on the arcade.

• Advanced CS students designed the console software itself: the arcade menu, the high score system, and the infrastructure that ties all the games together. This documentation is for the people who install and maintain that software, and for future students who want to write games or sounds for it.

• Engineering students designed and fabricated the physical cabinet — the wooden enclosure, the joystick and button panel, and the hardware that connects it all. They turned a software project into something you can walk up to and play.

• Music students composed the sound effects: the theme song that plays while you wait, the sounds that fire when a game starts, and the effects that respond to every jump, explosion, and collected point inside each game.

The ideas behind the project

The Lockport Arcade is part of Making With Code (MWC), a Constructionist introductory computer science curriculum developed at the University at Buffalo in collaboration with Lockport High School. Constructionism, a learning theory developed by Seymour Papert, holds that people learn most powerfully when they are making things that other people will use and care about — not just solving exercises for a grade. Making With Code is designed around this idea: every unit ends with a real project, and the games unit ends with games that run on this arcade (Proctor et al., 2020).

One of the design principles behind the software tools used in Making With Code is what the course’s designers call permeable media (Proctor et al., 2025). A permeable medium is a tool designed to welcome beginners in — keeping things simple enough to get started quickly — while also supporting deeper engagement as learners grow. The retro library used to write arcade games is designed this way: a beginner can make a working game with just a few lines of Python, but the same library supports arbitrarily complex game logic as students develop their skills. The arcade console itself is designed along similar lines: intro students can write a game without knowing anything about how the console works, while advanced students can read and modify the console’s source code directly.

The interdisciplinary structure of the project is itself a Constructionist design choice. When introductory CS students know their games will be played on a real arcade cabinet with real sounds, it changes what the project means to them—and to the engineering and music students whose work makes that possible. When student computer science projects are accessible to the broader student body, it helps more students become interested in computing.

How to use these docs

These docs are organized by role. Find the guide that matches what you’re doing:

Contents

• Console Manager
  • Installation
  • Running the Console
  • Adding Games
  • Debug Mode
  • Configuration
• Game Developer
  • How it works
  • Setting Up Your Game
  • Writing Your main() Function
  • Reading the Controls
  • Two-Player Games
  • Playing Sound Effects
  • Testing Your Game
  • Common Problems
• Sound Designer
  • How Sound Works
  • What You’re Creating
  • The Sound List
  • Creating Your MIDI Files
  • Handing Off Your Work
  • Troubleshooting

References

Proctor, C., Han, J., Wolf, J., Ng, K., & Blikstein, P. (2020). Recovering constructionism in computer science: Design of a ninth-grade introductory computer science course. Constructionism 2020 Papers, 473–482.

Proctor, C., Paljor, Y., & Bhatt, V. (2025). Permeable media: A design strategy for Constructionist software. Constructionism Conference Proceedings, 8/2025, 239–248. https://doi.org/10.21240/constr/2025/51.X