This soft circuit tutorial will teach you the basics of sewing circuits and even crafting your own DIY electronic components with conductive thread. The full guide with breakout tutorials will be available at labz.makeymakey.com soon!
I love bringing physical computing into my classrooms:
Physical computing means building interactive physical systems by the use of software and hardware that can sense and respond to the analog world. Physical computing is a creative framework for understanding human beings’ relationship to the digital world. In practical use, the term most often describes handmade art, design or DIY hobby projects that use sensors and microcontrollers to translate analog input to a software system, and/or control electro-mechanical devices such as motors, servos, lighting or other hardware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_computing).
. . . but as with all use of educational technologies, I believe that it should be used intentionally to assist learners in developing and expanding their content knowledge and life skills.
Last year Aaron and I wrote 20 Makey Makey Projects for the Evil Genius. We had so much fun creating all of the projects and finding interesting and whimsical ways to incorporate cardboard low-tech making with Scratch coding and mashing it all together with Makey Makey.
As we wrote the projects, we didn’t really envision it as a book for teachers to use with classes, but this fall, I noticed a tweet from Anne Smith. She created a whole lesson around the engineering design process and our marble maze Makey Makey project!
Nothing will ever take the place of this quirky, fun, and downright joyous piece of maker technology. With that being said, a MaKey MaKey is not an inexpensive piece of equipment – especially if you’re buying a set for a makerspace, library, or classroom.
That’s why we were thrilled to discover that you can replicate the fun of a MaKey MaKey using a much more affordable micro:bit.
When it comes to using the MaKey-MaKey in the classroom, my goal is for students to understand the how and why of using a MaKey-MaKey. It is a process. There is no right way to implement this incredible invention tool but I want to share what has worked for me. I like to do five 30-60 minute lessons that look like this:
Note: If your students are already familiar with coding then you can skip lessons 3+4.
This gave me the idea to see if my 5th grade team at Mason would be interested in having their students design Makey Makey mazes…..and the answer was YES!
Early this spring, each 5th grade class spent a week in the library learning about Scratch, Makey Makey, and creating marble mazes out of recyclables.
In this guide, you'll learn how to make your own data tracker by creating multiple switches and a counting system in Scratch. This can be used to track data as you wish. You might create a system for seeing how many students per grade level visit the library, or you might want to see how well your students felt about a concept you just covered in class. This whole guide is inspired from a conversation on Twitter where a teacher wanted to make her own exit ticket system.
A couple of weeks ago, I started creating a sound word game with one of my favorite Piggie and Gerald books, Pigs Make Me Sneeze. Around the same time, I saw a post from Tom Heck in the Makey Makey Educator group where participants in his workshop created an invention that helps young students learn new words. It was a serendipitous a-ha moment for me! I could make my own interactive word board so that my kinder kids could be empowered to play the sight word matching game on their own!
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