The Next Generation discover pinball at school Christmas Fair

[Nedreud]

This year the school was looking for new ideas for stalls at the Christmas Fair so I offered to take my VECTOR pinball machine and run a high-score competition. To keep it fair the school asked me to split it into three age categories: KS1 (Reception, Years 1-3, ages 4-7), KS2 (Years 4-6, ages 7-11) and Adults. Games were set to 5-ball because I suspected for most people it would be their first game of pinball and 3 balls would be over all too quickly. VECTOR is also nice in that if the ball drains without scoring you get it back to shoot again.

Surprisingly, only 2 KS1 children played and only 3 adults, but it went down a storm with KS2 aged kids. They racked-up 35 5-ball games in an hour and half between them! The high-score comp got very heated with 2 kids really battling it out. The winner scored just over 303,000, which for his 5th game of pinball ever and on VECTOR is impressive! Of all the people who played only 1 adult had ever played pinball before.

My wife saw just how much the kids enjoyed it and has allowed me to have the pinball in the house for 1 day and invite them all over! Anyone who knows my wife's feelings about pinball will realise this is a paradigm shift of epic proportions!

Here's a shot of my son (centre, blue t-shirt) with some of his class mates enjoying the fun:



(And yeah, my VECTOR is currently stuffed with a random selection of coloured LEDs...)

 

[replicas]

Brilliant, great to see the custodians of the future enjoying a game or two.

 

[Nickbs]

Great idea!

 

[Monkeyboypaul]

Anyone who knows my wife's feelings about pinball will realise this is a paradigm shift of epic proportions!

i don't know her that well (or at all), but this can only be a positive milestone. I'm taking TAF to work next week, but that's mainly for adults.

 

[Matt Adams]

Nice to see the kids playing but how the hell did you explain Vector to them? I had difficulty getting my head round it when I had one but then I do have a small brain, still don't know what I'm doing on acdc and that's been nearly 2 years ☺

 

[Nedreud]

Nice to see the kids playing but how the hell did you explain Vector to them?

I didn't! It's funny that although none of them had ever played pinball before they all implicitly understood the basic concept of using the flippers to stop the ball going down the drain hole. Only thing I mentioned was the 2 extra mini-flippers higher up the playfield as most people don't even notice the one on the upper playfield until after a couple of games! I guess that shows how, even in the UK, pinball is very culturally engrained. It's often used as a visual metaphor in advertising. It pops up a lot in children's TV programmes - think of the "Pinball Counting Song" in Sesame Street for starters. There are all sorts of terrible pinball video games (and some good ones too like Metroid Prime Pinball on the Nintendo DS).

I'd love to do something like run a kids pinball club, but moving one machine is hard enough!