BATON ROUGE - Some extraordinary students at the EBR Career Technical Education Center are making impressive strides in carpentry class. The students designed and constructed their own arcade gaming machine from scratch. 

"It feels empowering, it feels very empowering to know how to work something better than everybody else," Macy Jackson said.

Jackson is one of the three high schoolers who teamed up in carpentry class to build this arcade machine. Her partners are Taylor McMahon and Adean Tate.  

"Carpentry is a big part of the world, it's what's mainly used for housing and wood working and building furniture, tables and maybe little other things," Tate said

Although the carpentry students built it, the idea originally came from Jeffery Harrison, director of E-Sports. 

He says he wants to show how the district can bridge the gap between gaming and education. 

"Kids can start designing video games at some point and put them into these arcade machines. So wouldn't that be cool if you were a student and you design a video game and now it's at 10 or 12 schools throughout the district and other kids are playing your video game," Harrison said.

The students built the structure from scratch. They measured the boards, cut the holes and laid down the final coat of paint.

"This is why I actually joined CTEC, is because I wanted something else to do. I love school... its fun," McMahon said.

Harrison says this is the first of many machines they plan to build. He hopes to see the district making more money off the project in the future.