{"id":687,"date":"2015-11-27T17:07:29","date_gmt":"2015-11-27T17:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rachel.we-are-low-profile.com\/blog\/?p=687"},"modified":"2015-11-27T17:11:37","modified_gmt":"2015-11-27T17:11:37","slug":"makey-makey-summer-mix-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rachel.we-are-low-profile.com\/blog\/makey-makey-summer-mix-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Makey Makey @ Summer Mix 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

During July & August 2015, I ran a series of Makey Makey workshops as part of Plymouth City Council’s Summer Mix<\/a> project (free summer courses for young people between 11-19) at Plymouth College of Art<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"RachelDobbs_MakeyMakey_WearableInventions\"<\/p>\n

I was aware that the workshop participants would be likely to have used Scratch<\/a> (a visual programming language \/ authoring tool developed at MIT by a team including one of the co-creators of Makey Makey<\/a>) at school before, as learning code in primary school in the UK has been included in the curriculum since 2013<\/a>. I was particularly excited about exploring ways that experimenting with Makey Makey could allow the participants to build on the knowledge they had already developed in school, applying their programming know-how to include real-world objects and objects beyond the computer \/ on-screen environment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ICEBREAKERS<\/h2>\n

We started each day with a few icebreakers as the young people in the groups hadn’t met before and would need to gel quickly and work together. Each of these icebreakers were chosen because of their structural similarities with computational activities (sorting, sequencing, algorithms etc) and for the ways in which they encouraged the participants to move about, interact, learn each others’ names and beginning to share with \/ rely on each other in a low-pressure environment.<\/p>\n

> Let’s get the measure of each other<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Getting the young people to line up across the space in order of:<\/p>\n