Video
Keyboard touchscreen and Scratch
Adam Somlai-Fischer, creator of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Prezi presentation software, recent Osher fellow, and all around great guy, showed us how to simply and quickly hack a cheap USB keyboard to extract the inner pressure-sensitive “film” and turn it into a low-fi touchscreen by taping it to the computer screen. He showed us some simple programs that use the hack written in Processing, but they turned out to be too dense for my programming-impaired brain to satisfactorily modify.
However, having been playing with Scratch lately, I immediately thought it would make a great interface for it, and that it would be super simple to program for it too. A couple of hours later I had put together a simple but satisfying little game I call Going Bananas!
If you want to play with it with the keyboard, just press keys a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k, and l to launch bananas towards the monkey. Don’t let the monkey get too hungry, or it will die! Or course, it’s much more fun when you can poke at the bananas directly on the screen, so find an old (but not too old!) keyboard, break it open, tape it to the screen, and play it as it was meant to be played!
Marble Machines – training with the Explainers
As has become a sort of yearly tradition, we hosted a three-hour training with the new batch of Field Trip Explainers, who will be starting to work on the museum floor in a couple of weeks. This is a particularly fun and creative group to work with: their ideas are always clever, the mood happy, and the insights that transpire in the “debriefing” session afterward always worth listening to and taking note of.
Click on the image below to be taken to a gallery of their work and creations:
And here’s a sweet video of their wonderful contraptions:
Maker Faire 2009 time-lapse
Well, now that it’s over, it’s time to reflect on what an amazing ride Maker Faire was this year.
We organized a 3,600 square feet booth, including exhibits, snack activities, demonstrations, prototypes, and two PIE activities: a giant marble machines fort, and an even bigger enclosure where we let visitors build their portion of a collective chain reaction machine.
Photos from the event are coming soon. In the mean time, enjoy these frantic movies: they are two time-lapse movies, each compressing a full day of chain reaction workshop in less than a minute. You will notice the ebb and flow of visitors, and twice during each movie, the crowd building up to watch us set off the whole reaction, and then us taking it all down and starting again. It makes me tired and happy just looking at it!
Day 1:
Day 2:
The big set-offs were web-cast live on Saturday! You can see the archived versions here:
Bowling ball launcher
In the midst of preparations for Maker Faire’s chain reaction collective build, we’ve been tinkering with various ways of having a grandiose finale to the whole shebang, one that would pack a lot of impact, while still being faithful to the materials and aesthetic of the rest of the activity (cardboard, paper, home-made contraptions, household items, etc.). After several ideas and prototypes, we settled on an awesome ping-pong ball launcher, powered by a falling bowling ball. This short video documents some of our prototyping process, as well as the fun we have while developing ideas!
Chain reaction videos: explainer style!
As promised, here are two videos showing the contraptions built by the explainers during their training with us. Cool stuff!