For my second project with the second graders, I knew I wanted to incorporate circuity because they had studied the concept in Science earlier in the school year. Makey Makey’s were a fun way to integrating this. I first made a giant floor piano using HVAC tape to help them understand the process after I read them Doll-E 1.0 by Shanda McCloskey. I found this project through the Makey Makey portal and was created by Colleen Graves.
They first constructed their robot dolls using the materials in our Makerspace. It was fun to see how deeply they thought about their creations and some of them could have spent all 4 sessions just on designing phase. They were instructed to add 3 areas with conductive materials (screws, washers, pipe cleaners, copper tape). Once they were finished with the building phase, I showed them how alligator clips worked with the Makey Makey’s. Next, we moved to Scratch. This worked nicely as an intro to Scratch project because the code was quite simplistic. This project is definitely a keeper and I’m grateful the Makey Makey website has so many strong resources.
Maker Love Story 