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 week we revisited the Makey Makey so that students could experiment with some sites that were blocked during the last class. They started off with the How-To page at Makey Makey, then tried out other sites they knew would work with keystrokes. Some students also used Garageband. In Garageband, you can select a piano, then go to Window...Musical Typing, in order to make the keyboard, and therefore Makey Makey, respond as piano keys.

Students also had the opportunity to advance on their individual projects this week. I think it makes sense for the class to split our three days per rotation into some instruction and some project work. The instructional side will cover concepts that benefit everyone, where the project work is unique to each individual, with me serving as mentor/consultant. 

I have also opened up office hours, or "consultant time" one day per week so that students needing extra support can come in and work on their projects. 

This week I explored two different tools and the interaction between them. The first is Scratch, a free, online programming language that allows for very creative and artistic projects. The programming is easy to get into, but also comprehensive, so there's a lot to explore and try out once you get started. 

My project is a simple one, it's a short campus tour given by a flying butterfly. I took an aerial shot of our campus using Google Maps, and saved the image as a screenshot to place on the Scratch stage. I then grabbed one of the sprites (characters) from the Scratch library, to serve as the tour guide. Using commands that I dragged from one side of the screen to the other, I created the program step by step. See my Scratch project here. 

The second tool is the Makey Makey, which comes in because I used three key stroke commands to trigger the tour...LEFT, RIGHT and UP. Using playdough as arrow keys, one can take the tour by pressing down on them.

Below is a short clip of the Makey Makey set up and its interaction with Scratch.

This past Friday, some of our very own St. Matthew's teachers played with a Makey Makey kit. Watch as they play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star using clay, bananas, and some hand slapping!