System Design Exercise 3: Makey Makey
Makey Makey is a simple little electronics board that emulates a mouse & keyboard when plugged into your computer. It has little pads and jumper pins to connect wires, buttons, alligators clips, etc to create your own physical interfaces without having to do any embedding computing programming (aka Arduino).
Stuff to Bring
We'll spend at least half of class building a project with our Makey Makey kits, so come prepared with a few of the following:
- wire
- tin foil
- coins
- graphite pencils (soft lead, say HB) + paper
- silverware
- plants
- fruits
- water (including storage bowls, pouring containers, etc)
- marshmallows
- copper/metal tape
- Play-Doh
- conductive thread
- anything else that can conduct electricity
Novel Interface
Also, bring some kind of software you want to control. Could be a game, a text editor, a NetLogo program, a Processing project you've been working on, a Max or PureData patch, etc.
The goal for the end of class is to have come up with a new, physical interface to this program that we can all try.
Think of alternative, conceptual interfaces as opposed to the same mappings the program already uses.
The Makey Makey kit is yours to keep after class. You paid for it through your lab fee! Add it to your tool chest for Project 3.