Makey Makey Pizza Night...It's Electric

Our class received a message in Schoology for the upcoming class assignment of the night. We were to do some very brief research on electric circuits and bring some items to class, including the following: aluminum foil, cardboard, sliced celery, a banana and Play-doh.  And we were to come to class hungry.  What could we possibly be doing? Making a tray out of cardboard covered in aluminum foil and serving celery and bananas with peanut butter?  What about the Play-doh? Was is going to be some sort of stress relief class were we make things out of play doh while we eat our fruits and veggies?  Nope....not exactly.

We were introduced to Makey Makey kits.  The kit included a circuit board, alligator clips and a USB cable.  We were instructed to make the circuit board into a game controller for the game Frogger, but you had to be able to control the game without touching the circuit board. What?!!  You may as well tell me to hotwire a car.  Can I phone a friend on this? We did have a partner for this activity but my partner was as equally challenged as I, even though he is a computer science major.  We attached the USB cord to the circuit board and our laptop. We then tried attaching one alligator clip to each section of the circuit board. But we could only get the board to light up when we were touching it and could not figure out how to ground it or close the circuit. So we were given a couple of hints and realized Earth as pictured above was the ground bar.  But still no clue how to ground it without touching it. We tried connecting it to the banana, the celery and a piece of small ball of play-doh. But...nothing.  It was the opposite of stress relief. Finally one of the groups figured it out.  We had to connect an alligator clip to Up, Down, Left, Right, Space and Click. Attach an alligator clip to the ground bar and the other end to yourself.  You are now grounded.  Then attach the other end of each alligator clip to play-doh or another conducive material like celery or banana. The item it is attached to is becomes controller.  We could then make Frogger move. I can see how this would be very fun for an elementary school class. In case I haven't explained it well, I have attached a short video. I myself should probably never be on the show Are You Smarter than a 5th grader? Because I clearly am not.

.

What about the pizza you ask?  Well in our previous class professor Calderwood introduced us to a website which you can utilize to create polls called Poll Everywhere.  To demonstrate he created a poll asking our preferences in pizza toppings.  The options for the poll were plain cheese, buffalo chicken, Hawaiian, or pepper and onion.  We were able to vote via text message and watched as the results updated in real time.  The winning pies were, buffalo chicken, Hawaiian and pepper and onion. So, we were also provided a nice dinner and thankfully did not have to eat the fruits and veggies that we had poked an prodded throughout the class.

The other assignment we had to turn in was a two minute commercial about why your major is the best.  For this commercial I used a website called Go Animate.  It is a great website to use for short presentations or commercials.  I signed up for a free two week trial. With the free trial, my voice options were limited to the robot voices.  But I think overall I was able to convey my message of why I chose to major in criminal justice.   If you would like to view the video you can follow this link: https://goanimate.com/videos/0jR-5vH0ghoA?utm_source=linkshare&utm_medium=linkshare&utm_campaign=usercontent.  It will only be available until 04/23/18 when my free trial ends. 

For our final project  and class we are working on our personal websites and will be presenting those in class on 04/23/2018.