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Our 9-Lesson self-paced ONLINE workshop for children to learn how to use the Makey Makey. Our Online Academy includes guides and videos to take you from first use to confident coder, creating your own Makey Makey magic.
Ready to start inventing?
First set up takes seconds. Start out easy with a banana piano. Then create game controllers, invent musical instruments, make voting machines, and light up paper circuits. Connect Makey Makey to the world of things around you, and the possibilities are endless!
What you Get:
- A Makey Makey pack including universal touch keyboard, copper tape, spare alligator clips, small LED lights and coin cell battery will be shipped out to you.
- 9 Online lessons/projects on our Online Academy with guides and videos to help you get the most out of the Makey Makey features - and have fun!
What you Need:
- A computer with internet access to load the Scratch code editor.
- For building and making projects with your Makey Makey, some extra items that are great to have include conductive materials such as aluminium foil and paper clips.
Lesson Summary
1. Craft a Simple Circuit
Learn how a simple circuit works so you can create your first circuit and light your first LED! You will learn how to craft a simple circuit, learn how Makey Makey works by completing a circuit, and learn how humans can connect to make a key press on your computer!
2. Hands on a Makey Makey
Learn how Makey Makey works so you can start inventing! You will, make a simple sketch of Makey Makey, use your hands to trigger Makey Makey for piano, build a human circuit, and play and explore with Makey Makey.
3. What is Conductive?
Makey Makey works by alligator clipping into everyday things that have some conductivity. When you hook an alligator clip into a banana and you hold an alligator clip connected to EARTH, you are actually the conductive stuff that closes the circuit and makes Makey Makey work! But what materials can we use with Makey Makey besides bananas? What does it mean for an item to be conductive? or an insulator? or even a resistor? Let’s set up a simple experiment to find out! In this lesson, you will make a conductivity testing board to test items for conductivity; learn that everything in the world is either or conductive or an insulator; and start to ideate inventions with everyday stuff you can find in your home.
4. Draw a Playable Instrument
Have you already played a banana piano? Did you know you could draw your own instrument and play your drawings too? You’ll learn how in this lesson!
5. Code Your Key Presses in Scratch
Today you will code key presses in Scratch! Head to Scratch and create a project along with us! Choose your own characters and backdrops and let’s get started!
6. Craft and Code Interactive Stories
Craft a city out of cardboard, or draw a city to make an interactive poster. The idea behind this project is to craft or create buildings for an imagined city and then tell the story of the people who live in your crafted buildings.
7. Code Two Player Games with MakeCode Arcade
MakeCode Arcade is another great block based programming language! It is block-based liked Scratch but it also includes the JavaScript code for any games you make. It works great with Makey Makey and is a pretty fast set up to use your Makey Makey as a controller once you learn to code games in MakeCode Arcade!
8. Draw and Code a Poem Generator
Now that you know a little bit more about coding games in Scratch and connecting those games to Makey Makey, we thought it would be fun to tinker with literacy. In this project, you’ll write different parts of a poem, code them in Scratch, and then draw a poem generator.
9. 3 Ways to Program Click with Scratch!
In this lesson, you will learn THREE ways to program the click input with Scratch. Plus, we will also show you how to access click on the back of your Makey Makey.