Imagine having a physical drawing or collage come to life on screen with just a touch of your hand!
This activity challenged the class to work with scratch,copper paper circuits, switches, makey makey's or funkey's, and any other materials that would bring a interface alive.
Day one:
I decided to team up with Sarah D. for this project.
First off, we began brainstorming what could be our main story/ theme.
We sat at the table and threw out small ideas, until I thought of a band related theme. I mentioned that there was a switch that was powered when a magnet touches or hovers nears it and you can take a magnet and tape it onto a popsicle stick, which reminded me of a conducting baton. (Switch pictured below next to the copper tape)
We both were super excited because of our past experience of band and our love of music. So with that idea floating through our head we had to figure out what type of band event we wanted. We thought about doing something marching and related but then decided to do a concert theme.
We then set out to find the materials.
We used -
- construction paper - alligator clips
- copper circuit tape - a magnet
- Popsicle stick - a pen
- a funkey board - a magnetic switch
We began to create the scene of the four main parts of a concert set up. Including lines to help figure out were the copper tape may be applied and which would be the ground/ connect to a certain key on the funkey.
After we had a plan, we went ahead and laid the copper tape down.
And also added the folded pieces of paper so when we created the switch on the second layer they wouldn't touch until you pressed the area.
After we had everything built, we went to scratch and began working on the digital aspect of this activity.
Sarah and I began by picking that backgrounds and also the sprites.
We settled with the theater background (the main background used) and the light background (which you will see when you first open the project). For the sprites we chose a saxophone, trumpet, a wand ( the closest thing to a baton) , and drums.
Next we placed the sprites in the positions that we wanted them to be in and started the coding process (which is pictured below).
We had the sprites wait to pop up after they were pressed and after the the first background disappeared. When you clicked a certain spot on the paper, each sprite would pop up and make their "tuning notes"... then when you would get the magnet close to mag switch the baton would pop up and start playing Flight of the bumble bee by Korsakov,which was the performance.
And that was the end of the first class..
Day two:
When we started class, we set up our materials and plugged everything back in and attached each piece that corresponded to our notes and tested out our interface.
We did a full test run of the completed project. Sadly, the file to the full video was too large to download onto here but the end product was very exciting ! We had great questions on the last class day about the switches we used and overall the other classmates enjoyed out interface!
Problems we ran into or things we felt like changing:
We definitely had troubles with downloading a song from YouTube. I use to download music all the time from YouTube when I was younger but everything changed but I found a free sight that converted it after a little bit of research.
We also had troubles with timing and when the sprites needed to appear but that was figured out pretty quickly with the help of exploration, and one of the switches decided not to line up correctly so we went back and placed another copper tape to connect the switch.
The one thing I feel like we should have touched on, was the use of the broadcasting bar. This would make it to were you would have to warm up the instruments (touch the pictures) and then it would let you start the performance when the mag switch was activated.
Over all, this activity was definitely worth learning and exploring. Using this as a future learning tool in the classroom would offer so much to future students wanting to learn about the connections in their everyday life.