Makey Makey paper and pencil game controller

Posted on April 10, 2014 by blogmywiki

I had three goes at this before I got it to work: making a game controller from a sheet of paper with pencil drawings on. Pencil lead is made of graphite, which conducts electricity, so the Makey Makey allows you to draw buttons with pencil. It’s like designing and making your own printed circuit board, only with rather cheap, disposable tools.

First up I tried an HB pencil (I guess this equates to a No. 2 pencil in the US). No luck. Then a rather cool solid graphite pencil of my daughter’s. This almost worked, but wasn’t reliable. Then eldest son lent me his 6B Koh-I-Noor art pencil. This was The Business. Our new pencil and paper gamepad works a treat. (Don’t ask me what a 6B pencil is in US currency, but it’s soft, baby, darn soft.)

I tweaked the Scaredy Squirrel Scratch game code so the game is started by a spacebar rather than clicking the green flag, so I could add a start button too. Awesome!

And speaking of pencil grades… I just found this splendid poem by Spike Milligan:

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I’ll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

Posted in Arduino, computers, gaming, ICT | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Makey Makey

Posted on April 10, 2014 by blogmywiki

I am very late to the Makey Makey party, I know. In case you don’t know what it is, it’s a gizmo that plugs into just about any computer’s USB port. The computer thinks it’s a normal USB keyboard (MacOS X gets a bit hilariously sniffy about it, but it does work), and you can wire up anything that will conduct a small amount of electricty to it, and trigger keypresses by touching it. What does this mean? It means you can play a game or a piano by touching bananas, of course.

I’d never seen one until the other night, and the price always put me off. But at Code Club’s second birthday party, that all changed. Thanks to Marc Grossman for showing me the Makey Makey hooked up to Scratch (and for giving me loads of tips about teaching Scratch as well!). He showed me Play Doh controllers and also pointed out one thing I hadn’t realised: you need to be earthed, which means holding a wire in one hand to allow you to make a circuit by touching a blob of Play Doh (or banana, or market vegetable of your choice). The chief downside of this was that I had to put my beer down, but hey, I made the sacrifice in the name of science.

I was sold on the Makey Makey. I can see that it’s a fantastically simple way of hooking even more children into the possibilities of computers, of Scratch and Making. So yesterday I rushed out and bought one.

For our first project, we opened Scratch and set up some events that would play different noises when different arrow keys were pressed. Here’s Tilly demonstrating it.

Next I opened up my Scaredy Squirrel Scratch game I used in Year 2 – as this uses the arrow keys to move Scaredy around the screen, we didn’t even need to modify the code, just hooked up 4 bananas in a gamepad arrangement. Here’s Henry playing the game with bananas.

But it’s when you flip the Makey Makey over that things start to get really interesting…

I had thought all it could do was emulate cursor keys, space bar and clicks. Not so. On the back there are pins on the left that emulate other keyboard keys: W, A, S, D, F and G. Even more interestingly, the pins on the right emulate mouse movements and clicks. This has got me thinking about making some object that will allow you to draw on the screen – Scratch would be a good environment to get this going.

But there is still more. Intrigued by the ‘output’ pins on the top, I did a bit more digging, and it turns out that the Makey Makey contains an Arduino! This makes the price seem a bit more reasonable. It also means you can reprogram it so that it emulates any keypresses you like. This could be important if you want to use the Makey Makey to control a piece of software with key controls you can’t customise and which aren’t supported by default by the Makey Makey. The output pins also trigger 5v when certain keys are made, meaning that you can also control other things with the Makey Makey, such as motors and lights.

My mind is buzzing with ideas for the Makey Makey now – I think we might try drawing some buttons on paper with pencil next, or make a musical keyboard with jam jars filled with water. I really, really wish I’d had one when I was in year 2, now. They would have loved it, and I know they would have come up with some amazing ideas for what to make with it.

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Everything is Awesome in Uncanny Valley

Posted on April 7, 2014 by blogmywiki

Let me make one thing clear: I love The Lego Movie. It is truly awesome. I only just saw it, and yet despite all the glowing reviews and comments, I was not disappointed (though I would have enjoyed it even more had a certain radio film review show not told me about the shift in genre in the third act, but I’ll let that go.)

The look of the film is amazing – I had assumed it would be clean Toy Story or Lego Star Wars-type computer animated rendering of bricks. But they made it look like it was stop-motion animation with real bricks. The lighting – for example when Emmet drives the motorbike through the house – is just astonishing. The bricks all have small flaws in their surfaces to make them look real, the printing on the bricks is blobby and looks like a real screen print.

But I have one tiny niggle. I felt that the flaws in the bricks were, perhaps, too exaggerated. The thing that always marked Lego out as superior to other brick-based construction toys was the quality of the plastic and the mouldings – yes they aren’t perfect, but they’re damn close. And at times some of the Lego pieces in The Lego Movie looked close to the real thing, but possibly not quite close enough.

And that got me wondering whether The Lego Movie had wandered into aanother world, aside from The Wild West, Middle Zealand and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Had The Lego Movie shifted into Uncanny Valley?

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, Uncanny Valley is why The Polar Express is a hideous, terrifying movie that shouldn’t even be shown to sensitive adults, let alone children. It’s why Pixar’s Tin Toy is an uneasy watch. It’s that thing that happens when computer-generated images are close, but not close enough, to real humans (and animals too, I’d argue). Good designers and animators stylise their characters to make them more cartoon-like, to avoid this deep sense of uneasiness. Can Uncanny Valley, I wonder, also apply to (ahem) inanimate objects?

So the third act… well, here’s a spoiler alert. If you’ve not seen The Lego Movie yet – look away now. I wonder if the very real, flawed, chewed look and feel of the action taking place in the Lego universe part of the film is correct when considered against the real live action world of the third act. The Lego characters themselves are, until Emmet falls, unaware of any external reality (hello, The Matrix). So would it have made more sense, in terms of visual grammar, to have these scenes shot in pure, cleanly rendered CGI blocks? And then, when he falls, Emmet could become imperfect. All the characters could become imperfect – the final scene could be shot in the faux-stop motion style. It would mirror the way Hobbes changes from a real tiger to a toy tiger in the Calvin Hobbes frames where adults (or Suzie) are present.

Or perhaps I think about things too much, and I just need to kick back and relax with an overpriced coffee. Everything is Awesome. Everything is Awesome.

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Raspberry Pi cases – how do they stack up?

Posted on April 6, 2014 by blogmywiki

We’re a 3-Pi household now – our 2 very early 1st generation Pis are used as an internet radio and a wireless print server, and the last one is used for general testing, project making and also got pressed into service in school last week running Scratch in KanoOS.

All three have different cases, so I thought I’d compare them for features and price.

In the middle is my favourite, and the most expensive – the beautiful PiBow from Pimoroni. This ingenious case is made from layers of laser-cut plastic held together by nylon screws and bolts at each corner. Each layer is slightly different, so they are numbered, and assembling it is good fun. There is also a gap to allow you to get a ribbon cable out from the GPIO pins, although when I’ve needed to wire any buttons or anything up, I just leave the top layer of the case off. £12.95 plus postage.

On the right in this picture (and, confusingly, on the left in the one at the top of this page) is Mr Raspberry’s Fantastic Case – at £3.49 this really is a bargain. It’s totally clear, so I used this one for the Raspberry Pi I took into school so the children could see its parts clearly. It has a slot for a GPIO cable. It doesn’t hold the Pi particularly securely inside, as it sits at a slight angle and does move slightly, which might be a problem depending on how and where you intend to use it. It also comes without assembly instructions, which I actually found made a fun puzzle, but some may find this frustrating. It’s made from 6 pieces of clear plastic that need slotting together in the right order. But, hey, it’s £3.49!

My most recent case is the translucent one, slightly misleadingly described as Raspberry Pi Case – Clear by its retailer. It’s the one on the top in these photos. You can get it for £5 with free delivery on orders over £10. It’s made of just two pieces of very solid plastic, and it holds the board incredibly securely. It is not as transparent as the Mr Raspberry case, though, so if you want to show off the workings you’d be better off with a different case, but if you’re looking for an inexpensive rugged case to keep your Raspberry Pi safe, this is a good bet. Unlike the other two cases, this one doesn’t allow access to the GPIO pins, but that’s probably not an issue for most users.

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Scratch – how low can you go?

Posted on March 27, 2014 by blogmywiki

How low can you go? Well, in the words of MC Wildski, I think it was, ‘the lower you go, the more you show you know.’ He may have been talking about bass frequency, but I think it’s equally applicable to teaching coding via Scratch in a Primary setting.

They said I was mad teaching Scratch in Year 3 – well, perhaps they just said I was mad. Anyway, I’ve been teaching it in Year 2 for the last couple of weeks, initially in a classroom that had 2 available computers with Scratch installed (whereas in my Year 3 setting I had a suite of iMacs). How did it go? Rather swimmingly, actually.


the first children to write up and draw a successful game were rewarded with design time on the interactive whiteboard

As I’ve said before, whole-class Scratch teaching on the Interactive Whiteboard is surprisingly effective. You can get different children up to the board, and they love manipulating HUGE Lego blocks of code. Today I introduced variables – we added a score to our simple game, and set them the challenge of working out how to set the score back to 0 at the start of the game. Put the code in the wrong place, and the score is perpetually set to 0 – a great exercise in thinking and debugging. Each time I got a different child up to the board, trying a different solution. They loved it.

And then drawing. The interactive whiteboard is the best darn graphics tablet you could wish for. So much better than drawing with a mouse or – eek! – trackpad.

Lack of resources was a problem last week – I gave the class an A3 game design sheet to fill in: stage, sprites, a written description of the game. (At this point I had precisely 2 laptops with Scratch installed, and the battery died on one of them mid-lesson). And with half an hour of the lesson to go, most of them had finished. What to do? I set a new challenge. Mini-plenary. We are a games company. We have limited resources. Get into your pairs and prepare a PITCH to convince the class that YOUR game should go into production. They loved it. Children came to the front and told the rest of the class about their game designs, and got feedback and questions from their classmates.

Today, with the help of a very hard-working colleague, I managed to have about 8 working Scratch-enabled laptops in class, so half the class could start getting hands-on with Scratch, while the others did another paper-based activity fleshing out the character of their game’s main, er, character. The boy with the Mario T-shirt was a useful prop to talk about what makes us want to play games in the first place – why is it that Nintendo games are so enduringly popular?

I’d love to fill my classroom with Raspberry Pis, of course. I might try and sneak one in next week – my Kano one seems a good candidate. But I’m going to have to bring my own monitor; I can’t find a single one in school with an HDMI socket. Unless someone has 3 HDMI monitors they can lend me…

Next steps? If I can get them all at least getting the main sprite to move when the green flag is clicked, I’ll be happy. Some may do more. I’ll try to upload their code to the Scratch web site, so they can see their work at home – keep it, look at the code – and who knows, maybe remix it!

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