UHP
The UC Bearcat plays pinball in Columbus

EECE2001C: Pinball Design and Programming

The Art and Engineering of Mechatronic Storytelling

Why Take This Course?

What you'll do in this course:

  • Collaborate with your group to build a complete, working pinball machine from scratch
  • Build skills in problem-solving and systemic thinking
  • Dive into the history of gaming, arcades, and pinball (including an era of national pinball prohibition!)

Try this course if you:

  • Get nostalgic about arcade birthday parties
  • Have a competitive side, but want to use your powers for good
  • Enjoy solving puzzles--in games or in the world at large

Not an engineering or design major? Don't worry! This course is built for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and is accessible for students with a variety of experience levels.

Full Description

Pinball machines leverage tools from electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, and industrial design to create an immersive world under glass. Each discipline contributes an additional dimension to the experience, and the fusion of all these elements together create a unique medium for storytelling that sits at the crossroads of video games, robotics, and kinetic art.

This course explores the underlying engineering and design concepts that go into a complete pinball machine and how they work together to build a theme and tell a story. These topics will be taught at an accessible level for students outside of the engineering and design programs. We will also cover more than one hundred years of pinball history, including pinball’s origin story in Cincinnati, a period of pinball prohibition across the country, and the world of competitive pinball play.

This is a hands-on course, where the students will form multidisciplinary teams and spend the entire semester building a pinball machine to capture a theme or tell a story of their choice. At the end of the semester, the students will have created a complete, working pinball machine, and will have the opportunity to put their machines on display at the local pinball expo, Pincinnati.

In Fall 2026, we will also have a guest lecture and Q&A with the design team of the recently released Dungeons and Dragons pinball machine, and will have a copy of the machine in the teaching lab for the students to play. We will also hold research days in Dr. Fuchs’s lab, where students will play a variety of pinball machines while brainstorming rules and mechanism ideas for their own machines.

Instagram post from Stern Pinball praising Dr. Zach Fuchs for visiting a local elementary to discuss how hobbies and interests influence careers.

Zach spreads his love of engineering and pinball to anyone he meets, including a recent visit to a local elementary school where Zach discussed how their hobbies and interests can influence their future careers. Zach uses pinball in his University engineering lab and his courses are always at max capacity. Zach, keep up the amazing work!

A Note from the Faculty

Many of the world’s problems are not solvable using the skills from a single domain. Instead, future global citizen scholars must learn to combine skills from disparate fields and work together to tackle these complex, multidimensional challenges. From an engineering and design perspective, this means that the solutions and products we create can no longer ignore the impact they have on society.
 
This course educates students in how to break a complex, multi-domain problem into a series of interconnected, yet manageable, subproblems. This is the fundamental process for all system design. Additionally, pinball machines provide a self-contained example of how seemingly unrelated fields (engineering, programming, and art) can combine to create a synergistic and engaging system. The different problem domains of each subtask force students to evaluate the overall system from different perspectives, which can inspire creative solutions that may not otherwise be apparent when viewed from the lens of a single discipline. Additionally, the construction and programming of a real-world system provides student with hands-on experience in debugging circuits, computer code, and physical mechanisms.
 

Although these individual skills may not be directly applicable to their future careers, the general problem-solving and logical deduction processes translate easily to many other fields. The course will also cover the history and evolution of the arcade and pinball industry (several of the early pinball inventors were based out of Cincinnati!), as well as the rise of arcade culture and the current role of competitive pinball. Esports has seen explosive growth in worldwide popularity within the last two decades, as gaming has become an important part of modern culture. Therefore, it is important to understand not only how these games are played, but also how they are developed, manufactured, and the role they play within society as a whole.

Students in pinball design lab

Important Note

This course will not count toward the BSEE, BSEET, BSCMPE or BSCS programs or any minors in EECS.