Exploring Makey Kits

By: Angela Dela Cruz

In this week's class, we explored Makey-Makey technology and tried figuring out how to use it without directions. Makey-Makey is a kit that allows people to turn everyday objects into a control pad, and we had to make controls for the game Frogger. Our task was to create controls so that the frog can move up, down, left, and right, using the alligator clips, wires, and any of the following objects; Play-doh, bananas, and/ or celery. The pad also came with a USB cable to connect to a laptop, allowing us to play the game.

Without directions, the tasks was a little bit difficult in the beginning and our mistake was that we double circuited the control buttons. We thought that we needed to connect the alligator wires to the lead wires into the headers. We were successful in figuring out how to use the control buttons on the circuit board, but didn’t realize that we can use the controls without touching the board. This is due to the fact that we weren’t grounding it properly. We first tried grounding it on the earth, but we couldn’t figure out how to complete the circuit, and we tried grounding each control button to a banana. We finally realized we only needed one grounding wire, and in the end we were the ground that completed the circuit. The controls were then attached to their own pieces of Play-doh, and we used the Play-doh as the controls. Our overthinking confused us and made us overcomplicate the task.

I also created my own advertisement video using the program, Animoto. The advertisement showed why people should become physical therapists, which is my future profession. Animato was very simple to use and I did not have a difficult time exploring it. I was able to use any image I wanted from google, and add captions to each picture. However, the captions had a word limit so I had to make each saying or question short and to the point. There were different templates to use, but I chose a simple one with plain transitions since I believe it was more professional.