The Amazing Cringey Jukebox
At the end of the summer term, the Everything Electronic youth club, a free digital skills club for young people run by the Cromar Future Group in rural Aberdeenshire, wrapped up their STEM sessions with a project only a group of imaginative kids could have dreamed up: the Amazingly Cringe Juke Box.
The jukebox grew out of a run of playful experiments with Spoke boards. Earlier in the term, the group had been making talking flowers, singing potatoes, and touch-navigated audio storyboards. Along the way, while sourcing sound and video clips, they stumbled on a stash of gloriously cringeworthy videos, and decided, entirely on their own initiative, to build something to house and play them all.
What followed was a genuinely end-to-end build. The young people designed how the jukebox would look and work, recorded their own sound effects, sourced and edited video clips, created animations, and helped assemble and wire the whole thing. Two Spoke boards did the heavy lifting: one triggered videos from touch buttons made out of bolts on the front panel, plus a few hidden buttons for secret animations, while the second handled a "voting" system, playing sound effects for verdicts of "Cringetastic," "Meh!," and "Tearfully cringy."
It's a perfect example of the club's philosophy: if they don't know how to do something, they learn it together.
What strikes us most about this project isn't just the technical scope, though that alone is impressive for a school-term's worth of evening sessions. It's the sheer creativity and playfulness behind it. Nobody set out to build a jukebox, it emerged organically because a group of kids found something funny and decided, entirely off their own backs, to build something to celebrate it. That's real engineering instinct: spotting an opportunity, designing a solution, and building it end to end, from the "secret" hidden buttons to a voting system for rating cringe. The ingenuity on display, especially from young people just getting started with electronics and code, is exactly the kind of thing that makes this work so rewarding to support. Every community should have a club like this.
Cromar Future Group is a registered Scottish charity, SC047033. You can find out more at futuregroup.org.uk.
