Activity agreements allow young people to take part in a programme of learning and activity which helps them to become ready for formal learning or employment.
My name is Caitlin, I am 16, and I am on the Activity Agreements Programme at the Volunteer Centre Edinburgh. This supports young people to get started volunteering. Gemma is the officer who runs the programme. On Monday we visited the Games Masters exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. I wanted to visit the exhibition so that I could write this blog post to tell other people about the exhibition and why they should visit it.
We went on a Monday morning. This was a really good time to visit as it was quite quiet and we didn’t have to wait in any queues. At the entrance they told us it had been busy at the weekend.
I play computer games all the time, my favourites are Wii and X Box. When I was younger I really liked Megadrive games, and Mario. I thought I would like the Games Masters exhibition because I love computer games. Before I went I thought it might be a little bit boring, because I didn’t realise there would be so many games in it that you can play. It was much bigger than I expected, and there were so many you couldn’t play all of them, so it wasn’t boring at all.
The games I played were an old Sega arcade racing game, Pacman, SingStar, Space Invaders, a motorbike arcade game which you had to sit on and move about on to steer, Rock Band, Mario, Dance Central and The Sims.
My favourites were the Sega racing game and SingStar. The racing game was fun because it was like driving a real car. It had pedals and a steering wheel and a seat that you had to sit in. SingStar is a karaoke game. Usually I would be really shy doing that but I wasn’t shy at all when I was in the exhibition, I don’t know why! I really liked it but there were only two songs on it I knew, they only had songs on it from when it first came out years ago. I sang the ones I knew twice through!
The games I spent the most time playing were The Sims and Dance Central. I have played The Sims before, but I have never played the old original version. I liked building their house. I made it blue and added a second storey. I have never built a house before because on the newer versions I always go to the beach. Dance Central was fun because you have to copy the big screen and dance. Gemma could play it with me, so it was a competition. We danced to Macarena, Starships, YMCA and a song we didn’t know. Gemma won, but she always put her level on ‘easy’ and I kept putting my level on ‘hard’!
Gemma’s favourites were The Sims, Pacman and Sonic. She said she liked them because she played them when she was little. She also really liked Dance Central – she had never played a motion sensitive game before and didn’t even know they existed.
The best thing about the exhibition was that it was really fun and you got to play all the old original arcade machines. I have played things like Pacman before but I have never even seen an old arcade machine before. The only bad thing about the exhibition was that all the games consoles had different controllers, so it was hard to know which buttons to press when you first started.
I would definitely recommend others to come, it is fun if you are really into gaming, but it is also fun for people who haven’t really played games before, because you get to try them out and see how much things have changed over the years.
Find out more about the Game Masters exhibition and book tickets here: http://www.nms.ac.uk/gamemasters/