Thank you for coming along to my Makey Makey workshop at the Tayside Regional Collaborative’s #TRICDigifest conference. I hope that you have an enjoyable and informative time with me and that you will feel inspired and enabled to take your learning from the workshop into your own setting.

Inspiration

Some time ago I was lucky enough to attend the Mozilla Festival in London and at this I saw a young man called Eric Rosenbaum demoing his new invention the Makey Makey. I was in awe of this device, what it could do and the opportunities for learning that this brought to the table for me. I followed this up some time later when my initial interest and playing about with it was sent in to the stratosphere when I saw Le Frutophone on the Makey Makey gallery. This led me to find out a out a piece of software called Soundplant which then led to my Are you ready for this jelly workshop idea that I use.  I planned to use the Makey Makey as the context to explore Interdisciplinary Learning (IDL) in my Learning Beyond Subject Boundaries with a focus on Science (circuits, conductivity), the Design Process and Digital Learning.  For some reason I thought I could do a similar thing to Le Frutophone but by using samples from classic Destiny’s Child and Beyonce tracks. Connecting the Makey Makey to the jellies would then allow me to inhabit my DJ Jelly persona by DJing by touching the jellies to trigger/play the samples!

Use with students

I use this with my students and you can see this year’s student responses for some inspiration:

Our taster video to promote the Makey Makey makes from MA3:

Video examples 1 from MA3

Video examples 2 from MA3

Informed by

In terms of reading to support your thinking in this area I suggest these articles as sources for you to spend some time reading/engaging with:

1. NESTA Digital Makers
2. NESTA Young Digital Makers report (2015)
3. Screen time? What about creativity time? Mitch Resnick
4. The maker movement in education
5. What do we mean by digital making? Oliver Quinlan

Today’s workshop

In our 50 minute workshop we will address a couple of relatively simple and accessible design challenges that will allow you to start to make sense of how the Makey Makey works which will then allow you to begin to think about how you can extend the complexity and challenge for yourself and your learners:

1. Game Controller: Use the materials provided to create a joypad that will allow you to control a computer game such as Pacman, Dance Dance Revolution or Space Invaders.

2. Scratch Piano: Use the materials (fruits) available to create a playable keyboard that will allow you to play a digital Scratch piano.

Please feel free to take photos/videos of today’s workshop and to tweet using the hashtags #makeymakey and #TRICdigifest

Further inspiration

1. The Makey Makey gallery
2. The Makey Makey Labz
3. My Makey Makey beauties list on Twitter
4. Makey Makey on Pinterest