This DIY Whack-a-Mole Game Is a Smash Hit!

If you do a lot of online shopping, you probably come across plenty of cardboard boxes. Though they are pretty easy to recycle, perhaps you might consider other uses for them first. After all, if kids can make forts and spaceships out of them with no special tools, certainly as a Maker you can also re-purpose them creatively!

One such build comes to us from the Sunfounder Maker Education team, where they’ve turned a scrap box into housing for a Whack-a-Mole game. Nine arcade-style buttons are laid out in a grid, which control a virtual version of the game displayed on a nearby monitor.

But rather than smash animatronic plastic moles with a mallet, a player just has to hit the buttons with a glove-equipped stick as the corresponding moles pop up on screen. The computer interface is accomplished by an Arduino-compatible, ATmega32U4-based Multi-Control board acting as a keyboard.