Fun and Learning with Makey Makey!

The Peas Piano.

Makey Makey is a wonderful electronic kit with which you can create fun inventions with everyday objects. You can bring life to fruits, veggies, toys, paintings or anything you can think of and is just limited by your imagination.

How does Makey Makey work?

It was created by two MIT students, Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, in collaboration with Sparkfun Electronics. The kit consists of a circuit board, alligator cables, and USB cable which helps convert the everyday conductive objects to a few keyboard keys(like up arrow, down arrow, left arrow, right arrow, space bar and some more) and mouse click.

What can it be used for?

Kids, educators, artists, and engineers all around the world are using it to create fun projects and games. Educators are using it to teach kids. You can make a piano with any fruits or veggies or anything that is a conductor of electricity. It can be used to create sensors, game controllers or a toy cardboard guitar or to make an interactive painting. You may use it to teach kids about current flow, conductors and insulators. There are thousands of possibilities, so just imagine and create.

What fun did we have?

Finding out if the object is conductive or not.

We had both learning and playing time with kids. First, the kids learned about how the current flows and that it needs a complete circuit for electronic things to work. We made a piano with peas and found that the pea key won’t work if the electronic circuit is not completed. Kids connected a few of the things around us to the kit and found which are conductive and which are not.

Next, kids had an amazing time adding sound effects to the Hotwheels toys. We coded in Scratch to add vehicle sounds to the key presses and then connected those keys to the vehicles through the kit. It was a perfect hands-on for kids in programming and hardware in an absolutely exciting way.

Check out the videos below to see our creations!

Piano keys with Peas.

Sound effects with Hotwheels.