The BGC Airdrie youth club is bringing kids back into the retro era, as their very own arcade machine got a recent level-up thanks to the expertise of local high-school students.
Grade 12 students in the mechatronics program at W.H. Croxford High School took on the challenge of repairing BGC Airdrie's old Pac Man machine over the course of the 2023-24 school year.
Manager of Youth Programs at BGC Airdrie, Sam Morros, said the idea came to them after a teacher noticed their old Pac Man machine while visiting the club's headquarters at the Ron Ebbesen Arena. Disappointed that it no longer worked, the teacher recommended reaching out to the mechatronics program at W.H. Croxford.
“We were lamenting that it was dead and broken forever,” Morros said.
After reaching out to the school, Morros said they jumped on the opportunity to help. Not equipped with the skills to rebuild and program the machine, Morros said the students took them under their wing.
Highlighting the hard work they put in, Morros noted the significance the students in Airdrie were able to take on this challenge.
“The Croxford kids did all the hard work,” she said. “It is really cool to be able to say that youth in Airdrie really built this thing from the ground up, with very little grown-up supervision, and with that high-school level of knowledge that they have.”
W.H. Croxford teacher John Remus-Everitt, who looks over the mechatronics academy within the school, said that upon inspection, they realized the original electronics of the Pac Man game could not be fixed.
But with the experience the students had developed from the previous years, they came up with a plan to build a brand-new machine.
“[The students] were responsible to check it out, assess it, figure out what needed to be done and at that point we realized it was too far gone from the original working of the electronics,” he said.
According to Remus-Everitt, the students were faced with multiple challenges that tested their skill sets. For instance, he said the buttons needed to be reconfigured and that they also needed to upload the RetroPie games.
With the machine originally being only single player, the students wanted to make it more interactive by adding an additional player.
“They ended up having to reconfigure the whole console to come up with a concept to how to make it so two people could play at a time,” Remus-Everitt said.
Remus-Everitt added that the experience provides his students with a sense of accomplishment and the importance of giving back to their community. He said that this provides students the opportunity to recognize that they are a part of something bigger.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Remus-Everitt said they often partnered with local community groups such as the Girl Guides. Post-pandemic, they have found it more difficult to make those connections.
“When Sam from Boys and Girls Club reached out to ask if we would be interested, it was like yes, definitely. It’s something that we would definitely want to do and pursue,” Remus-Everitt said.
