In class today, we obviously worked with the Makey Makey. At first, Eli and I really had no clue what we wanted to make. My problem with brainstorming for our invention was that I really couldn’t grasp the infinite opportunities we had and the lack of boundaries. I couldn’t get my head around an idea that made sense with the Makey Makey. I still don’t think that I fully understand the full potential we have of creation with the Makey Makey.
After just messing around with the Makey Makey for a bit, trying to figure out how it worked, we started experimenting with different conductors. We made buttons out of bananas, oranges, play-doh, and ourselves originally. We ended up making a very basic piano keyboard out of the fruit and play-doh and started exploring with that. We then drew the piano keys on a piece of paper with the heavy graphite pencil. The lead was an effective conductor as long as the line was heavy and dark enough. This is our keyboard:
Eli figured out how to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and treated the whole class to several performances. If you missed class, you really missed out on some quality classical piano skills.
Next we took the Makey Makey to a new level of exploration as Eli and I were joined by Nastassia and Mike. Me connected the extra wires to the ports on the back of the Makey Makey which enabled us to make our own mouse/trackpad. We just used conductive tape, scotch taped to the desk and alligator clips to attach the wires to the tape. Here is our make-shift mouse/trackpad:
We were hoping we would be able to cover it with some kind of non-conductive material so that it looked like one, full creation, but that didn’t end up working out. Our “mouse” was able to left and right click, and move the cursor in all directions. We even figured out how to move the cursor at a diagonal. Nastassia experimented with our mouse on an online drawing/painting app.
Like I said before, my mind wasn’t able to fully grasp the potential and freedom we had with the Makey Makey. I am usually a very creative person but I couldn’t come up with any ideas of what to use it for. After getting to actually use them today, I understand a little bit more. I would say that today exceeded my expectations because we actually ended up making something other than what we had already seen be created. The one thing that we didn’t have time to do, that we wanted to try was to combine several Makey Makeys and make a larger keyboard. We couldn’t accomplish that today because we didn’t have the time to re-program the Makey Makeys to correspond to the keys we needed and we weren’t able to find a keyboard that used the keys provided for use by the Makey Makey.
When you first told us that you decided to take part in this experiment because it connected and was relevant to what we have been doing and talking about in class, I’m not going to lie, I called BS. My previous English teachers always seemed to be able to find deeper meaning in things that never seemed to actually be there. (For example, “Why did the author choose to make her shirt blue instead of red?” Maybe her shirt is blue simply because the author likes the color blue.) But after actually working with the Makey Makeys today I realized that they are, indeed, relevent to English right now, especially after just turning in our first papers.
Making something with the Makey Makeys very musch resembled the writing process. In class on Monday we were supposed to “outline” our plans and ideas for what we wanted to make today in class. An outline plays an important role in essay writing so that the writer has their thoughts and ideas organized and ready to be written down and explained. Each invention also required several “revisions” and “rewrites” in order for it to reach its “final draft” stage. I know that my group changed plans, inventions, and strategies a few times throughout the class period.
At the end of the day now I am wishing I had been able to come up with some cool ideas. Our keyboard and mouse were cool and worked out the way we wanted them to for the most part but I wish we had been able to use them in a more creative way. And if not to actually be able to put them into use today, at least to have plans or ideas for a more advanced application of our designs or new designs in general.