What if you could play a videogame with a banana? Or a drum machine with a burrito? MaKey MaKey lets you do exactly that—and more.
MaKey Makey turns everyday objects into digital touchpads for your computer. Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum designed it while they were in grad school at MIT. Inspired by the maker movement, they wanted to create an open-ended way of getting people to think creatively about how kids interact with our increasingly networked world. The result is a clever kit that makes a controller of literally anything that conducts electricity.
“Makey Makey is a device for allowing people to plug the real world into their computers,” said David Ten Have of JoyLabz, which produces the kit. “We want people to be able to see the world as their construction kit. And basically the way MaKey MaKey works is that it pretends to be a USB keyboard.”
Each kit comes with a circuit board—the heart of the kit—a set of alligator clips, and a USB cable that plugs into your computer. The USB provides power to the circuit board, and the alligator clips link the board to any object that conducts electricity. Turns out, a lot of things conduct electricity. Food. Plants. Play-Doh. Even you. “We were shooting for creating a product that had an incredibly low floor for participation, but an incredibly high ceiling for expression,” said Ten Have. “We’re seeing things made as simple as a banana piano and as advanced as measuring tools for chemistry labs, for instance.”
The possibilities seem endless. Kids can turn their art into an instrument. Connect the alligator clips to people’s hands to make a human drum machine. People have transformed a trash can into a calculator and a slice of pizza into a game controller. Your garbage can is full of new controllers.
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