I Wanna See You Makey-Makey

On Tuesday, August 4th, at Maker Camp we worked with the Makey-Makey. 

We learned about different conductive materials. Then we made our own controllers for games like Frogger with our conductive materials. 

We had a controller made in the shape of a heart out of homemade playdough, a puppy made from playdough where the legs were the arrow controls, and some potato and apple controllers. 

The kids had a lot of fun and learned about circuits. They learned that they needed to be holding the ground wire in one hand and the electricity was passing through them to complete the circuit and tell the computer to do something. 

We also talked about how computers communicate to each other in binary. Mr. Anthony used the example of turning the lights on and off representing “1” for on, and “0” for off. The kids understood that when they were completing the circuit, it was like a “1” was being sent to the computer to tell it to move up, down, left, or right. They learned quite a bit today!

- Maraina