On Wednesday we had the opportunity to play with the makey makey. We were told to use the makey makey in a creative way. Our first idea was to make our own band using the makey makey and fruits. We would hook up the drums to an orange and use a piece of paper with a picture of a piano as the piano. It looked like it would work but then we realized no one in our group had musical talent. Our so called “song” didn’t sound as well as we thought it would. Our next idea was to use gummy bears and different fruits to play super mario. We successfully managed to do this. Each person in the group had a specific button. For instance I controlled the jump button and we had another person control the up or down button. This was what were going to present till we saw that the group next to us had been doing this since the beginning of the class. We didn’t want to copy their idea so we agreed to play an online version of Dance Dance Revolution using the makey makey.
This idea was difficult because we first decided to make the arrow buttons out of clay and attach the makey makey. It turned out that some of the buttons did not work because the clay and the makey makey wasn’t conducting well. We had to hit the clay very hard for the controls to work and each time we did that, it would make the clay softer and cause less conductivity. With this being a fail and the class about to end, our last option was to use oranges as the controls. This actually worked but like the clay we had to tap the oranges very hard in order for it to act as the controls. At the end we had orange juice squirting everywhere. It was a mess but using oranges to play a game was pretty cool. Overall I though the makey makey was a very cool gadget to mess around with and who knows maybe it could be used to make things easier in our every day lives.
