Makey Makey Blog

An Adventure with Lanetta Sova!!! 

The Deal:
I take care of the Scratch Coding, Lanetta master-minds the controls.

connected wires ready for class

behold the makey makey!

We had challenges with just being creative.  [We were both busy over the weekend and didn't want to commit to anything ridiculous.]  When we originally presented our idea, [things went well, then some over-achiever inspired our instructors to tell us...] we needed to be more creative. [I'm a little glad, cuz Lanetta's idea was cool.]  Our final project idea ended up being to have a pong game that required team work and the controllers being water. The two players must hold hands and race from one end of the table to the other to move the paddles. (Only one player is holding directly to ground, the second player is holding ground by holding hands with player one.)  [I originally thought this would be something to sabotage people with, like yank them from their button.  FYI: Left the option for points in the game.  But Lanetta wanted it to be kinder, and it made more sense than "they'd just let go of the ground.")  The original game is won when 10 points are earned.  [We changed the tone from celebrating the winner to a bit of a beratement: the loser] is sent a "pick up the game" message.  [Because in our game, you both 'lost' the volley goal.]  If the space bar is pushed, or splashed rather, the game ends and a message appears saying something about giving up.  
[PS, I tried like 8 different versions of Pong before finding one that was good.  Still felt the need to tweak a few game-play structures, you can see what on the game's page.  http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/18736427/#player ]

Our way awesome remixed pong game.  We won!!

Our main challenge was in the controllers.  At first we thought we could [save effort of packing bowls, and splash mess by] using wet paper towels to be the controller; but upon testing we learned that hitting a wet paper towel does not work.  [too bad.]  Our solution: dip the wire into bowls full of water. Now we have working buttons, but their spacing needs to be longer. To make the wires longer we taped the smaller wires together, but the connectivity was not strong enough.   [curse the connections!  Ain't nobody got time to go to the store for a solid coil of wire!  we didn't have enough conductive thread, and my copper tape is too fat, it would be a HUGE waste.]  Solution: use clips from both of our kits and have a wire in between the clips.  [That's teamwork!  ;D]

failed paper towel idea

Failed taping of wires

We have a functioning and fun game; which will also provide a workout. This is a success. We were happy to find that holding hands to both be connected to ground was a success. We revamped an already preexisting pong game on Scratch. This was successful and a big time saver (no hours trying to reinvent the wheel).  [I actually leanred a bit more by looking at their successful code.  Might go back and try to fix glitches in my original game.]  We can’t wait to see the class play our game.  [Mwahahahahaha....]

Finished!