Frequently throughout the year, particularly when Creator's Studio is not in session, I will post here about other projects we have going on throughout campus. One such project, in 3rd grade, is an Operation-style game we create with students while they are studying about the human body. Inspired by Josh Burker's wonderful project on this topic, we use Makey Makeys and Scratch, along with cardboard, clay and conductive tape to build our Operation Games. Students design a body on cardboard boxes, and select what organs or parts of the body they want to operate on. They cut holes for those organs, line the holes with conductive copper tape, and bring all the "wires" back to a central location for connection to the Makey Makey. We use a set of conductive chopsticks as the operating tool of choice, which is also connected to the makey makey. Students make their organs out of clay.

While this project works well at school, we realized last year that in order for students to enjoy their completed project at home, we had to design an alternative circuit. We cannot provide Makey Makeys for every student, and it seems unreasonable to expect parents to purchase one (although now with Makey Makey Go the idea is more realistic). Therefore, we designed a simple circuit by adding a coin cell battery, an LED and wire. When students make contact with the rim of any of their operation spaces, the LED lights up. 

An alternative to this set up is to use a buzzer instead of an LED (keeping in mind the buzzer must be rated for 3V), but we felt this was a nicer, quieter option. You can see the final piece in the last row of photos below. 

This is Drawdio, invented by the same person that created the Makey Makey, Jay Silver. Drawdio uses conductive tape, a small speaker, a battery, the graphite in a pencil and a bit of circuitry to allow you to make drawings that come to life with sound.

You can buy a ready-made Drawdio pencil that just works, or you can build it yourself with a kit of parts from places like Adafruit Industries. I decided to build it. As this was my first time soldering in a long time, it's a good project because there aren't too many places to mess up! Adafruit provides a very detailed tutorial on how to build Drawdio, so that's what I used. 

The concept is pretty straight forward. You have a speaker powered by one AAA battery, set up in an open circuit. The second you close the circuit with your body, the speaker sounds. Your body closes the circuit because you are touching the conductive tape with your drawing hand. The tape is connected to the circuit board/speaker, then out to the top of the pencil where it connects to the graphite inside the pencil using a thumbtack. You draw with the pencil, and touch the drawing with your other hand, thereby closing the circuit. Okay, it might be easier just to watch! Notice how the pitch adjusts depending on distance between hand and pencil.