Festival2012/Submit/alligator clip the internet to your world with makeymakey
Alligator Clip the Internet to Your World with MaKey MaKey
- Title of the session: Alligator Clip the Internet to Your World with MaKey MaKey
- Your name and affiliation: Eric Rosenbaum, Lifelong Kindergarten group, MIT Media Lab
- Session format: Learning Lab
What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?
MaKey MaKey lets you turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet (see MaKeyMaKey.com). It's an invention kit for everyone, making creative physical computing accessible with no electronics and no programming required. The MaKey MaKey circuit board pretends it's a USB keyboard, but you make your own keys by alligator clipping it to objects that are at least a little bit conductive. Press the spacebar by completing a circuit when you touch a banana, your grandma, or a penny. Make a piano out of pastries, or a game controller out of play-doh.
In the session, after a quick intro to MaKey MaKey, most of the time will be spent tinkering and hacking. We'll focus on inventions that extend open source web technologies into the physical world in playful new ways.
How do you see that working?
We'll give a brief intro to the MaKey MaKey kit, and give people a chance to try it out individually or in small groups. We'll do some brainstorming together, spend most of the time hacking together crazy inventions, and then wrap up with demos and reflection.
We will plan to have a variety of materials on hand for people to build with, including conductive materials, craft materials, and tools.
How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?
This depends on the number of MaKey MaKey kits we can bring along (10 is feasible), and the amount of craft materials we can bring or find locally. As the numbers of participants grows, we can have people work in pairs or threes. This would put a practical upper limit at 30, though a smaller group would be more comfortable.
How long within your session before someone else can teach this?
Once people get their hands on a MaKey MaKey and get it working, we find they quickly become eager to share the magic with others. Could be as little as 15 minutes.
What do you see as outcomes after the festival?
People will be able to continue tinkering after the festival, since they can get their own MaKey MaKey kits through our website. The project is open source, and derives from the Arduino project, so we are excited to see modifications, remixes, extensions etc. Generally we hope that the experience of repurposing everyday objects and websites with MaKey MaKey will change how people see the world, and open up new creative possibilities.
