Wakey Makey Makey, GalleryCamp14 Derby QUAD

I've come across this funky little circuit board before but this was my first hands on and it was quite a delightful experience  my dear!

I was attending the Makey Makey workshop at the GalleryCamp14 Unconference at QUAD this year. 

Your connect it via USB to your computer then use wires ending in croc clips to connect the board to any electrically conductive object, and away you go. 

And I do mean ANY electrically conductive object.

 From bananas to pencil graphite to squidgy sweets and play dough, it all works fella.  "You can even hook up a row of students and bang their bonces like a drum machine"

Dialup the makeymakey website and then got to the 'how to' section. You can control games and music making software and basically anything that requires a controller. 

The computer sees the board as a control input interface and  this is why the magic happens - when you add software like Scratch you not only create your own game, you create how its controlled.

If you already know scratch you'll soon be up and running, jumping, shooting and banging in no time, just check out the tutorials abound on the Makey Makey website.

£40 from Maplin. Bargain. Go play.

The Random Excuse Generator App

The Create Project 2013 Presents the .....

The App we have all been waiting for!! Created using MIT App Inventor - a great tool for rapid prototyping!

In April during workshops at Sheffield Hallam University, Jenson Grant worked with a group of Y11 secondary school students to build the worlds most useful Mobile Phone App!

Design View of our App in MIT App Inventor

During our design process we developed a design brief and thought about the user mechanics of the App. 

Why the user would want the App and what the user was going to get out of the experience.

Blocks view shows you all the programming logic . You need the latest version of JAVA on your computer to run this! 

During the design and building process we; 

- thought about what we needed in our lives - what would make us excited!

- sketched some designs and opened MIT App Inventor accounts. 

- designed an interface

- built the programming block

- tested and packaged the APP!

Our completed prototype ready for soft testing and distribution to our mobile device!

MIT App Inventor is a quick and easy to learn tool for rapid prototyping and we would need to make lots of changes to our app if we ever wanted to bring it to Market but as a quick and easy introduction - it was faultless!

The create project is an initiative supported by Maxine Greaves at Sheffield Hallam University, to encourage young people to creatively engage in digital technologies. 

PIE Vs SheffieldArtsLab

A Digital Arts and learning collaboration/interaction between Destinations Arts and Sheffield Hallam University.

A project that experiments with interactive creative learning tools.

More information coming soon!

MIT App Inventor

Originally a Google Project, MIT App Inventor allows to you to create on Android based handheld devices. MIT, the makers of Scratch are now managing the project and offering loads of support to would be App developers.

The App Inventor offers a natural progression from the Scratch programming environment as it offers a similar colour coded 'drap-and-drop' coding solution. 

It all online with no downloadable moving parts and if your used to Scratch and programming concepts, its very easy to pickup!

I recently created an App that translated English to Igbo, which was nice...

Apps in Classrooms = Power!

If Michael Grove proposes genuine 'out of the box' teaching re digital literacy, giving school kids the means of digital production, the tools, the understanding to analyse, pick apart, innovate, build and share - it could be  a powerful thing.. only 'if' though!