On Monday of last week we had a guest speaker come to our class to give a presentation about this new invention called the Makey Makey. The day prior to this I took a look at the website and very briefly looked over this project. It honestly did not catch my eye at first because it looked like something that was in its first stages of being produced and I figured it would not really work for a class full of beginners. So when the speaker showed us how he was able to control a video game with a banana controller, I was left wide-eyed and my mouth gaping open from the shock and excitement. This is what science has come to? Using a banana as a controller?! It was like an interesting piece of news I heard that no one would believe me when I said it.
On Wednesday of that week we were able to construct our own Makey Makeys as a group. Our idea was to create a painting of the five boroughs of New York and when you touched their names on the map, a song or phrase directly related to that borough would play. Unfortunately, this idea that we thought would be an easy task at first proved to be far more difficult to carry out. After some help from technicians who were familiar with we managed to hook up the Bronx to Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny from the block,” a lyric from Mos Def’s “Brooklyn” for Brooklyn, a car honk to represent the traffic jams and taxi cabs of Manhattan, and Wu-Tang for Staten Island but we weren’t able to think of anything to represent Queens.
There were many problems with the software and due to time constraint we were unable to finish. But this project reminded me very much of the process of writing an essay. We faced many of these stops and blocks that you very much experience when writing a paper. Also, we were almost at the point of discarding our initial idea because nothing was working. This is like the thesis of an essay –the main idea you are working towards and our main idea of the Makey Makey. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to go back and start over, no matter how much you love your initial idea. If it doesn’t work then it is ready and in the need of some change to the plan. Fortunately for us, we only need some tweaks to our idea and software and we managed to make things work.
I had a few fun ideas to make with a Makey Makey but I think they are too advanced for the simply wires, tape, and paint we had at our resource on Wednesday. Maybe I will have more luck with the 3D printer!
