This never quite made the blog, and has been languishing in the bottom of my e-mail inbox (among a few hundred other e-mails to get to! – sorry).
Sector67 partnered with our near north neighbor Vera Court Neighborhood Center to re-purpose an *old* Make Trax video game console that was no longer working, but was too cool to throw out. We wanted to take things in an educational game direction, but with something that the kids would still enjoy playing as a reward for getting their homework done! Crayon Physics was decided on, and the next step was to get to tearing out the old video game console electronics (which still booted right up after 33 years in existance). We had the kids at Vera Court start by taking out the old screen, electronics, power supply and the video game badging adorning the outside.
After the old contents were pulled out and properly recycled, the next step was to clean up a few decades of dust:
Once the dust was out, we spent some time sorting out a LCD monitor mount that would fill out the original glass:
We were able to repurpose a computer donated to the center by Epic Systems, and had it up and running in no time with Crayon Physics (after a few registry changes to support a vertical orientation and full screen) – check out the nice top banner graphics:
The old console had a lot of outside graphics that were going to be very difficult to remove, so rather than peel the old off, the kids painted over it with chalkboard paint and made it their own:
