Pinball Lab

Introduction

Fresno’s students took a trip to the arcade this year!  During the 2025-2026 school year, AIMS partnered with Fresno Unified School District’s (FUSD) Career and Technical Education (CTE) department to design and facilitate a one hour engineering workshop for third graders. The goal was to give students an opportunity to not just learn about engineers but to experience being engineers themselves.  We developed “Pinball Lab” to encourage students to think creatively when problem solving and to support them in developing the perseverance and the confidence to test their own ideas through iteration.

In this workshop, third graders designed and built their own pinball games inside of a sloped cardboard box. Their game needed to include targets for their ball and obstacles.  We chose open-ended materials to encourage tinkering and problem solving. We also wanted to use every-day, common materials to make the activity accessible.  This approach gave students the structure of an engineering design challenge, while also providing an opportunity for them to practice agency in how they developed their projects. 

Throughout the year, AIMS visited 45 FUSD schools and 156 classrooms!  That is over 3,000 pinball games built, and every single game created by a student was different from the rest.  In every classroom, we observed students quickly realize that their initial ideas often didn’t work, and they were going to need to continuously test and improve their games.  We saw students take ownership of and pride in their creations; we saw them excited to share their ideas with their peers and even more excited to take their games home.  

We live in a world that is rapidly changing.  We need future generations that are able to design innovative solutions to problems that don’t even exist yet.  Pinball Lab is just one example of how we can offer students the time and space to practice the steps of the engineering design process, which will undoubtedly help them develop critical innovation skills that will serve them regardless of what future career they choose.