Know how things work —— Makey Makey and invention literacy

It is of so much fun exploring Makey Makey this week. The basic idea of it is to turn every conductive object around you into a key of the computer. The mechanism is not that complicated, while the applications are so wide. In knowing how electric circuit work and what objects are conductive, everyone can easily invent interesting interfaces combining digital and physical stuff.

Here is a percussion instrument I made with a rubber glove and some aluminum foil. ⬇️

I love dancing. and a principle of dancing is to use your body moves to express music. Then oppositely, what about use different sound effects to portrait your body moves? Originally, my idea is to make an instrument responding to different dancing moves. While later considering the feasibility, I decided to apply the concept of finger dance. Therefore, my work is a beating glove with each finger making an individual sound effect. Then you can simply use your fingers as a percussion instrument, or you can do some complex finger dancing and the music software would express your moves with sounds.

Think further, similar device can be used to add sound effects in order to heighten the atmosphere when people give a speech and do hand gestures. Also, it can be useful when people who are disabled of speaking trying to communicate with others.

Anyway, the process of making this project reminded me of the simple fun of making physical stuff of my own, which I haven't enjoyed for so long. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with crafting. While as I grow up, people believe that who can manage digital stuff, such as coding, data analyzing or digital designing, are more promising and I give up this hobby eventually. An interesting thing I observed on the first class of Digital Foundations is that all my Chinese classmates did their homework with all kinds of computer software while some other classmates brought their handmade pieces to the class. I'm not judging here which is superior. But in my opinion, the need to promote invention literacy in China is much more urgent since maker space is not a thing in Chinese schools.

Jay Silver made it a very good point in his blog that invention literacy is nothing different than "literal literacy" and we ought to have an idea of how things around us are made and work, since they are the same with books, which are the essence of human wisdom. More important is that practicing invention literacy would no doubt help students in design thinking, creativity and in their curriculums as well. Taking Makey Makey as an example, a simplest lesson plan, of which the learning goal is to understand conductivity, could be asking students to find anything they could to be the keys of a Mario game. I believe it would be much more fun and engaging than merely memorizing that metal is conductive and plastic is not.