Makey Makeys and Coding with Scratch

One of our most popular pieces of equipment is the Makey Makey.  We purchased six of them and set up a demo at the circulation desk, where students can play the Scratch-based games or musical instruments that work with it.

A student showing how the Makey Makey works.

If you haven't seen the Makey Makey, it is an extremely fun and relatively cheap piece of equipment to have in a makerspace. By connecting one to your computer, it allows you to use conductive materials (people, coins, fruit, water, graphite pencil, etc) to control the arrow keys, space bar, click button, and other keys on your computer, by creating a circuit.  The video below shows some of the fun things you can do with it.

MaKey MaKey - An Invention Kit for Everyone from jay silver on Vimeo.

We've even incorporated it into our campus tours, by having the students create a human band, which has been a huge hit with the visiting 8th grade classes.
 

Back of the Makey Makey.

But while many students have enjoyed playing with it, one student took it a step further.  After trying out one of the Scratch-made piano programs, one freshmen student decided that she wanted to create a piano that included more keys.  Having used Scratch previously, she was able to create a keyboard that included a full octave (with functional black keys) using the extra controls on the back of the Makey Makey (which work with the W, A, S, D, F, and G keys on the computer). Here is her program in Scratch, which we included in our Makey Makey demo:

Piano program

Happy to see students expanding on ideas/equipment they've learned about in the Maker Lab.  We hope to see more projects like these in the future.

Happy Making!