Last Tuesday was the fourth and final session of the summer Creative Coding Club at the public library. It was MakeyMakey time.
The library now has four MakeyMakey devices available to check out! Combined with the eight I borrowed from my school, we had enough for each person to have their own. The library also has Colleen and Aaron Graves’ book 20 Makey Makey Projects for the Evil Genius. I spent some time looking through it ahead of time and ended up building the marble maze project. It had just the right “difficulty to fun” ratio for me.
I also gathered some supplies, built a couple of pressure switches, and made conductive playdough (I made a gluten-free version with chickpea flour and the kids thought it smelled odd). I put a few example projects into our Summer #4 Scratch class studio.
Starter MakeyMakey projects
At the library, we had a fully stocked supply table, thanks to Kathy, and I set up a homemade dance mat (foil and cardboard), the marble maze, and a playdough button piano as examples.
I often find it difficult to introduce and explain what a MakeyMakey device does in a clear, efficient way. It is much easier to show the MakeyMakeys in action then let the students explore. Three of the students had used MakeyMakey devices before (at our session in May) so they helped me explain to the others. I did try to hit the key concepts about making a complete circuit or connecting yourself to earth and what to code to get a response.
The best thing about this session was that we had the gift of time. Extra time to play and explore. We were just doing this one open-ended thing – playing with MakeyMakey devices and Scratch. The whole time. 90 minutes. It was lovely. We were on Summertime, where you could dive into a project and not worry about constantly moving on to the next thing.
One student had a banana, a potato, a cucumber, and a ball of playdough connected to her music project. Another student made playdough buttons to play his Moonhack project from the previous session. Another made a 2-player rocket race game.
At one point I walked by two of the girls and they both just had the biggest grins on their faces while playing banana pianos and adjusting their code.
Staying connected to earth was tricky. I made a playdough ring for my finger but that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Other students had other ideas.
One student, near the end, told me he failed. He’s my big idea kid, always exploring the boundaries and testing even bigger ideas. A simple banana piano? Forget it. He thinks up complex ideas and tries them out. He and I both weren’t phased by his declaration, and I didn’t try to help him “be successful”. I just nodded and sat with him for a second in case he wanted to explain where he had failed but he just went on to try some other idea.
My one takeaway on this session was how lovely it was to have time to explore and not hurry off to something else. I enjoyed this slower paced session and they did, too. I have to remember not to over schedule our time and stop worrying about them running out of things to do.
We did stop to share and admire what everyone was doing and then the pizza arrived! Great way to end.
I hope some of these Scratchers check out one of the library’s MakeyMakeys and spend more time exploring the possibilities.
My Code Club Journal 