My group immediately used the Makey Makey as a game controller. We played with the instrument game to start out and get used to the Makey Makey’s wires and controller. Afterwards, we decided to play a more complicated game with gummy worms attached to the alligator clips. As we were playing Mario, we noticed that with the gummy worms, only one person could actually play so we started making bigger arrows on paper with conducting tape. At first we wanted to use the arrows (up, down, left, right) to play DDR, by sitting on the arrows to ground/hit the keys. That didn’t work out so instead we used it to play Mario. There were 5 people in my group so each person had either a direction or the space button. We grounded the Makey Makey with a big circle of clay so that everyone could touch it and play. I got the down button because I’m bad at games but it really made us work together and interact with each other.
I thought that the session was very fun but no one really knew how the Makey Makey worked, like the reprogramming and other more technological aspects. Our second idea was to reprogram the Makey Makey controls in the back to keys like control, s, p, c, and v to make it easier for people to click shortcuts in Microsoft Word. We didn’t have time to actually work on it but it and reprogramming the Makey Makey was extremely difficult. It didn’t really meet my expectations in that aspect but the other parts of the session were really fun.
When I write a formal essay, I know that it can always get better. When we were working on our Makey Makeys, a lot of the projects were very rudimentary and just a draft of our idea. We didn’t have time but with the help of others (peer editing) we can always polish it and make it better. The same thing applies to essay writing. In the session, I learned more about the different steps it took to set up the Makey Makey and more importantly, more about cooperating with other people and creative thinking. A lot of the things we wanted to do weren’t possible so we had to think of alternative methods to achieve what we wanted.
