BERNARDSTON — In a typical arcade, you might expect to play some Pac-Man or Galaga, but Bernardston Elementary School students came up with some ideas of their own with their “cardboard arcade.”

On Wednesday, students of all grades could be found catching falling pieces of hay or whacking gorillas with a hammer as they participated in Danika Tyminski’s sixth grade class’ cardboard arcade, capping off their engineering and design unit.

Students were tasked with taking their favorite children’s book and adapting it into a game that their peers could play. Tyminski said the concept of a cardboard arcade came from the 2012 short documentary “Caine’s Arcade,” which followed a 9-year-old boy’s efforts to run a homemade arcade out of his dad’s auto parts store in East Los Angeles. Tyminski said having her students create their own cardboard arcade was a perfect way to cap off their engineering and design lessons.

“The only direction was to use cardboard and things they could use around the house; it was all student-led,” Tyminski explained while looking at her 24 students’ projects. “It’s a day of play and a chance for sixth graders to connect with the littler ones.”

For some students it was a chance to think outside — or, more literally, inside — the box. Liana Gauvin designed her game around the children’s book “There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” In a sort of carnival-style game, players were tasked with throwing “flies,” which took the form of puff balls, into a cardboard woman’s mouth, all while Liana was inside the box waving a flyswatter around trying to deflect throws.

“It’s an interesting game,” Liana said, adding that the book was something she always read with her parents when she was younger. “I loved that book and I still do.”

Sophia Wood designed her game around “The Hidden Staircase,” a book in the “Nancy Drew” series that follows the detective investigating a Colonial mansion. Part of the book involves the sighting of a gorilla in the mansion — which turns out to be a person wearing a gorilla mask — so Sophia adapted her game to be a whack-a-mole of gorillas popping out of the box.

“The ‘Nancy Drew’ series is my favorite,” Sophia said, adding that there are three different ways to play: regular whack-a-mole, a guessing game and a pattern game. Sitting behind the game and controlling the gorillas popping out of holes while students played the game, Sophia said it was a fun way to wrap up their engineering unit.

For Jaelyn Poliski’s game inspired by “The Three Little Pigs,” she invited players to step into a large cardboard box where they are then tasked to catch falling hay and sticks — in the form of drawings on paper — in a game similar to money-catching machines. Jaelyn said she and her family “did a lot” in coming up with the design of the game and it was a “very interesting” project to undertake.

“It was very fun,” Jaelyn commented. “I worked a lot of nights on it.”

Tymanski said the cardboard arcade was a great community-building event that she hopes to continue.

“I think this will become a tradition,” she said.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.

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