Caine’s Arcade: Lessons for Educators

10-year old Los Angelean Caine Monroy has enjoyed more than his 15-minutes of fame thanks to a short film about the elaborate cardboard arcade he constructed in his father’s used-auto-parts shop. If you haven’t seen the video, stop reading and watch it first. Finished wiping away the tears yet? Well, the story only gets better. The internet release of Nirvan Mullick’s film in March and subsequent viral spread set in motion yet more heartwarming events. In the days immediately following the video’s release, strangers donated more than $150,000 to pay Caine’s college expenses. His story was national, and then international news within a matter of weeks, and at last count, Caine’s Arcade had more than 7 million combined Youtube and Vimeo views.

The business world quickly took an interest in Caine, with a Forbes magazine blogger predicting he will be a billionaire by age 30, and the University of Southern California’s business school inviting Caine for a speaking appearance. And indeed the arcade has turned out to be an entrepreneurial success for Caine. But this is as much an education story as it is a business story. Caine has received invitations to a summer program at MIT, and an offer from UCLA to customize an academic track. The Caine’s Arcade Facebook page includes postings from elementary school students inspired to create their own cardboard engineering projects. Another group, Caine’s Arcade School Pilot Program for Inspired Educators, is testing curriculum ideas inspired by the cardboard arcade, and already more than 100 schools in nine countries have had students participate in related project-based learning activities.

Educators can take away several messages from Caine’s story. In addition to the many uplifting elements of this tale, it should also provoke serious reflection upon the kinds of learning opportunities our schools provide to students. George Monroy’s East LA used-auto-parts shop proved fertile ground for Caine’s learning. Like many young boys, he is a fan of arcade games. The garage was a space where he could indulge this interest, and his imagination. The combination of cardboard boxes, office supplies, and free time allowed him to follow flights of fancy, to solve problems, and to tinker with and improve his creations. Caine also benefitted from adults who believed in his talents and supported his explorations, even when he did not have any customers. 

How often do students at school encounter learning opportunities like Caine has experienced? Not often enough, as standardized-testing-dominated curricula threaten to squeeze out space for individualized and uncharted pursuit of topics of interest to students. The combination of factors – space, resources, time, freedom, support, and fun – that allowed for Caine to produce his cardboard masterpiece is not a regular part of school for many students. Instead, they are bombarded with classes that do little to cultivate their instinctive desire to learn, innovate, and create.

Teachers feeling accountability pressure may believe they do not have time to help their students to imagine and explore. But powerful learning rarely happens without a motivated learner – despite teachers’ best efforts – so taking the time to cultivate students’ interests is worth it in the long run. The stale, disjointed, test-prep dominated curriculum and instruction a disappointing number of students experience has indeed left many unmotivated by school, but most all youth are motivated by something. Schools simply do too little to discover and build on the motivation which is there, even though kids who are inspired by something happening at school are probably more likely to end up passing those pesky tests.

In our schools, more emphasis must be placed upon the search for personal passion and purpose. Caine has clearly found something to which he can dedicate himself, and when students develop such a drive, it can make quite a difference in how they approach learning of all sorts. Furthermore, Caine’s passion has resulted in experiences outside of school that have broadened his perspective on the world, and have surely strengthened his general sense of self-efficacy. 

Good teachers recognize ways in which they can tap into passion to motivate students to learn in their content areas. Caine’s passion for arcades offers educators many ways to hook him into their curricula. Tasks or classes that before might have lacked clear relevance in Caine’s mind could become more relevant if connected to his excitement about and dedication to his arcade.

As a Latino male living in Los Angeles, Caine belongs to a demographic that has a 50% high school graduation rate. It’s not too far-fetched a scenario to imagine Caine, who has struggled some in the past with reading, being labeled “at-risk” and subjected to a remedial curriculum that fails to appreciate and build upon his many strengths. Given his newfound fame, the financial support for his education, and the now global appreciation for his talents, this stifling fate will probably not befall our precocious protagonist. But it is what will happen to too many of his peers. In today’s American public schools, a large proportion of administrators’ and teachers’ energy and attention is focused on a narrowed curriculum, limited types of data, standardized testing, and students’ perceived deficits. If these educators fail to also find time to provide opportunities for exploration, they run the risk of failing to develop the many potential Caine’s sitting right in front of them.

Caine’s arcade experiences have helped set him on a path to a bright future. It’s not because of knowledge that was poured into his head; it’s because of the exploration he was allowed to do, and the passion and purpose he has found. Caine is the hero of this story, but adults as well helped make it possible. Educators can contribute to the creation of similar stories if they are open to the lessons of Caine’s Arcade. Schools must be places that look to build on students’ interests and strengths, and provide opportunities for them to be curious, autonomous actors in their own learning.

In filmmaker Mullick’s mid-September follow up to Caine’s Arcade, a second short video entitled Imagine: Caine’s Arcade Goes Global, George Monroy reveals that Caine has indeed become more self-confident and is doing better in school. The film goes on to describe the work of The Imagination Foundation, started in the wake of the first Caine film, to “find, foster, and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in kids.” The Foundation has sponsored the Global Cardboard Challenge, meant to be a day of play and fundraising for its work. More than 270 cardboard events in 41 countries occurred around the world for the first challenge; hopefully such activities will cause more educators to take notice. The type of learning embodied in Caine’s story should not be limited to Saturday events away from schools. Although some might argue that Caine is an anomaly, I agree with Mullick’s opinion: “There are so many other kids like Caine out there.” Many students have the potential to surprise us, and themselves, with their creative capacities, if only our schools become more oriented towards helping them to do so.

5 Tips for Making the Most of Competition in the Classroom

Competition can be a great way to enliven the classroom environment. But if it's not set up right, you can disengage and demotivate just as many students as you draw in. When I first began teaching, I thought about what types of competition I had enjoyed most as a student. I thought such competitive activities would be the best for my classroom. But most teachers are the types who were successful in all kinds of classroom competition. We must remember that many of our students are not like we were as students. We need to design competitive activities that will work for the greatest number of students, not just the one like us.

1. Team-based Competition
The first few competitions that I tried to set up my classroom were competitions between individuals. My co-teacher, however, gently and wisely nudged me towards setting up team competitions. When teams compete there is less risk of individuals becoming demotivated by activities which they feel create too much pressure or attention on them as individuals. With competition organized around teams, it is less likely students will feel the type of negative pressure and stress that can demotivate some students. Credit for success and for failure is spread across the group and therefore weighs less heavily on each individual student's shoulders. Group competition is also better than individualized competition because it provides the teacher another means by which to teach collaboration skills that will benefit students throughout their education and careers.

2. Interdependence in Teams
Just because you put students in groups to compete doesn't mean they will actually work together effectively as a team. Many teams will have a cocky and/or extroverted student who will be happy do most of the group's work in a competition. Teachers need to take steps to build interdependence in teams and make sure that all team members participate in the competition. One easy move is to randomize who will provide the team's answers or ideas through numbered heads. Also, when designing any group activities, I prefer group size 3 to 4 students. This size is enough to create a collective intelligence that should benefit the group, and small enough to avoid free riding by less engaged students.

3. Avoid Zero-sum Games & Juggernaut Teams
Zero-sum games require that for each winner, there is a loser. In the classroom, you risk demotivating many of your students if you only use zero-sum competitions. It is not necessary to organize pseudo-competitive self-esteem building activities in which everyone's a winner, but it is possible to design competition along what I call the Olympics model. Instead of just one winner, either individual or group, why not have at least gold, silver, and bronze winners? Also demotivating can be the situation in which one team is too much better than the others. I prefer multiple short rounds of competition because this allows more teams the potential to win and I can also quickly reorganize teams if I realize that one team is too strong for much actual competition to happen.

4. Competition between Classes
A great way to avoid some students within a class feeling like they cannot win is to set up competition between different classes. If, for example, you have two Algebra 1 classes of the same academic level, have them compete against each other in someway instead of or in addition to competitions within the class. Such competition with other classes may allow you to cultivate positive peer pressure within the class and help to avoid the potential negative social consequences of always pitting groups of students within the same class against each other. Even if you do not have two classes of the same type, maybe a colleague at your school would be open to establishing some sort of competition between similar classes. There are also websites that allow for students and classes, even in different schools or countries, to compete against each other such as the math website Manga High.

5. Celebrate Success - Wall of Fame
The payoff from competition does not have to stop at the end of the competition itself. I've used my old childhood trophies to add some fun to competitions; the gold medal winning team's name is hung on the trophy until the next time we compete. Snap pictures of winning teams and add these images to a real and/or virtual class Wall of Fame. You can share these pictures with parents who will then have an opportunity to ask their child about their shining moment at school. The pictures also provide you with a quick way to scan to see who hasn't had their turn to enjoy the limelight, and see how you can encourage them with other means.

Competition can be a double-edged sword. Be sure you set it up so that you are not simultaneously motivating one group of students and demotivating another.