Makey Makey Will Make You Love The “Internet Of Things”

Ever wanted to wake up in a Disney cartoon where everything around you is animated and interactive? Now you can…Turn a bunch of bananas into a piano. Turn your friends into a synthesizer. Turn a trampoline into a slideshow controller. Turn your hand into a game glove.

Makey Makey is a little circuit board that comes with a set of alligator clips. You can attach them to anything even mildly conductive (a body part, a glass of water, alphabet noodles, paper clips, Play-Doh, or fruit for example) and use that thing to control your computer as though you were hitting the keyboard or moving the mouse. The device plays well with the Arduino in case you want to attach it to simple sensors.

The not-so-secret agenda for Makey Makey, according to creators Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, is to allow anyone to become an engineer. “We want 7 billion pairs of hands making the world the way it is, not 100, not 1,000,” Silver told Fast Company. “When you’re designating meaning and purpose in the world, you’re creating value with your hands.”

Makey Makey is part of a creative and technological down-shift in which very smart electronics are dumbed down to make the world manipulable by ordinary people in ways previously available only to developers. It’s similar to Twine, another Kickstarter-funded device out of the MIT Media Lab that makes it easy to connect to the world around you via software interactions. Silver and Rosenbaum have been hacking at this problem for a few years now, and their previous efforts include the music-related projects Drawdio and Singing Fingers.

BY ANYA KAMENETZ, taken from https://www.fastcompany.com/3013992/makey-makey-will-make-you-love-the-internet-of-things