boot
The problem with student games
Students make genuinely good games in MakeCode Arcade. Then the lesson ends, the tab closes, and the game is never seen again. All that effort, and no audience. The SPARK Arcade exists to fix exactly that: a public game wall, styled like a shelf of NES cartridges, where every finished student game lives permanently and anyone can walk up and play.
It runs as a single static site on GitHub Pages. No accounts, no app, no server to maintain. Just a URL that works on the classroom big screen, a laptop at home, or a parent's phone.
cart
From share link to cartridge
The publishing pipeline is deliberately boring, because boring means kids can run it themselves. When a game is ready, the student submits their MakeCode share link and it lands in a Google Sheet. The arcade reads the published sheet and turns every row into a cartridge on the wall.
- Add a row, and a new cartridge appears. No code changes, no deploys.
- A content word filter checks titles before anything goes live on the wall.
- Lazy loading keeps a wall of dozens of games fast, cartridges only load as you scroll to them.
The sheet is the CMS. It's hard to overstate how useful that pattern is in a classroom: the same trick drives the Red vs Blue scoreboard and the room's timetable display.
play
Pick up a controller
Select a cartridge and the game opens in a fullscreen player overlay, no browser chrome, just the game. The wall has full gamepad support, so an 8BitDo or Xbox controller works the moment it's plugged in. On the classroom's big screen it feels like a real arcade machine, which is exactly the reaction you want from a nine-year-old seeing their own game up there.
The first version of this was a little localStorage-based launcher that only worked on one machine. It grew into the live sheet-fed wall one iteration at a time, which is its own lesson: ship the small ugly version first, then version it up. The castles in Red vs Blue are versioned for the same reason.
zap
Voting with lightning
The newest experiment is zap voting: favourite games can be zapped with sats over the Bitcoin Lightning Network, so the leaderboard reflects what players genuinely rate rather than who shouts loudest. It connects neatly to the other side of what I teach, real value, moving over an open protocol, attached to something a student made.
1-up
Why an audience changes everything
The quality jump when students know their game ships to a public wall is enormous. Suddenly title screens matter, difficulty curves matter, bugs matter, because a younger kid is going to pick up the controller at lunchtime and judge the work honestly. Publishing is the final boss of every project, and the arcade makes it part of the routine.
Play the arcade
This is the live cartridge wall, click a cart and play right here. Machine mode is the fullscreen version that runs on the classroom big screen.
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