 Are you asking yourself just, how does makey makey work? And wondering how to use makey makey with scratch? Well stick around, because then this makey makey basics tutorial will cover things like circuits, which materials conduct electricity, compatible operating systems, and more. All this, come in your way. Hello world, Serving Scratcher here, teacher-surfer programmer bringing you the goodness of learning to code through video tutorials. If you're new around these parts, consider hitting that subscribe button to stay in the loop. Educators, be sure to check out the show more button down below in the description for a link to the Serving Scratcher mailing list. That's where I'll send out some monthly news that'll contain some resources to use with your learners. But hey, let's makey makey this tutorial. So where can you use your makey makey? Basically, any device that connects a keyboard or mouse into it, you can use makey makey. It's not officially supported on mobiles and tablets, but you might get lucky. Before we get our hands busy with scratch, we're first gonna have some understanding of what a circuit is, so let's go check that out. So just what is a circuit? Let's get a battery up to help us understand. So think of this battery as storing some potential energy. It's stored in the form of volts, but it doesn't do anything. In order for us to convert this potential energy into work, we need to complete a circuit. Got a light bulb here on the screen and I wanna use this battery to power this light bulb. So what I can do is I can get a wire and I can wire that up to the light bulb, but that's not enough because our circuit is not yet complete. So what I'll need to do is get another wire and round off our circuit and as soon as I attach it, our light bulb turns on. Now we can introduce the idea of a switch. You would have used a switch to power a light bulb at home. When the switch is flipped to off, then the light bulb circuit is incomplete. We've broken the circuit. And when we flick the switch to on, we've once again completed the circuit. Now when we're thinking about makey makey, we can replace our battery with a laptop and our switch with a keyboard key. We don't need our light bulb anymore. So when the key A is pressed down, that will complete our circuit and that's when we get the A displayed on the laptop. We can now replace that keyboard key with the makey makey board. We can then associate something like the left arrow press with some bananas. So now our bananas mean left arrow press. Then we can get involved. And if we attach ourselves to the earth connection and then we go ahead and we touch the bananas, we should complete a circuit and we should simulate a left button press on the laptop. Now we know what a circuit is. Let's jump over to scratch. Right, here we are in the scratch project editor. I'm just going to have a few sprites down here that will help us demonstrate a couple of the buttons that are here on the makey makey. The first thing we need to go ahead and do is connect our makey makey. I'll just bring up a modal overlay to show you that now. Go grab the red USB cable, connect it to your computer. Then grab your makey makey and connect the back of it. And you'll see all the lights light up including the red power led. If you get bombarded with a whole heap of pop-ups to install stuff, because it's your first time connecting the makey makey, just close it all down. You don't need to do any of that. Cool, now that we've got our makey makey connected, let's just demonstrate right away how we can use it. So if I take my right hand here and I connect it to the earth pin, and I can use my left hand here to complete the circuit because the flow electricity will pass through me. And if I go ahead and press the space, you'll see on the screen that we'll get a space between the T and the capital C. And there we go. I can use the down arrow and the right arrow to get to the position between the Y and the capital M and then I can make another space just like that. So that is how our human skin can connect a circuit. All right, that's the basic stuff, but how do we get makey makey to do some scratchy stuff? Remember the makey makey is just a keyboard. We've got the keyboard arrows here and we've got a space and a click at our disposal. We've got those events in Scratch's hack blocks. So we can head on over to the events and we can listen for when these events happen. We can also jump into the extensions to find the makey makey extension. We've got two hack blocks here at our disposal. You'll see that we've got one that mimics the event hack block, all the same business that is going on in there. And we've also got another one here that is specific to makey makey. So there are some specific combinations that you can listen to. I've just clicked on the connection sprite and I'm here in the costumes. What we're gonna do now is go ahead and check out some conductive materials. And we're going to display these costumes when a press is detected. The first conductive material I wanna demonstrate is copper tape. So when the left arrow key is pressed, I want us to switch to the costume copper to show that we've got a connection. I'm also just gonna play this sound connect effect when done. So what we can do now is grab some alligator clips and connect these to the makey makey. I'm going to connect one to the earth pin and I'm going to connect the other one to the left arrow key. Just like that. Here I've just cut out some copper strips. I'm gonna stick these onto the paper and connect the alligator clips to them. As you can see here on the clipboard, I've now stuck those copper strips onto our paper. I'm gonna now connect up our alligator clips. I'm gonna use the black clip to connect up the ground and I'm gonna use the white clip to connect up the left arrow. Here we go. Okay, now our two clips are connected. Remember before how we conduct electricity as well? Well, if I place my thumb and I put it between these two copper strips, I'm gonna complete the circuit. And you'll see in the scratch, we should see a display and a sound. And we do success. The next type of conductive material I'd like to demonstrate is graphite. Now graphite is great for art projects. You'll see here I've got a 2B pencil and a 6B graphite pencil. I'm gonna draw two lines across our page, one 6B and one 2B. Then we're gonna get our alligator clips and connect them to either side and to a different button. Okay, now we're gonna get two more alligator clips and connect one to the down arrow key and one to the earth. Over in scratch, we need to set up the conditions to handle for our pencil connection. So let's go ahead and duplicate this code block that we have here. Instead of a left arrow, we're gonna go for a down arrow now and let's switch to the costume of a pencil. We'll play the same connection sound. So what I've got ahead and done is connect up those alligator clips to our 2B graphite line. And just like we did with the copper tape, I'm gonna get my thumb and put it in the center button here because we'll complete this circuit. Okay, so nothing's happening there. That's interesting. So what I've gone ahead and done now is connect our alligator clips to either end of the 6B strip. I'm gonna get my thumb and put it on our button. And boom, we have a connection. So you may have noticed that this line is actually slightly darker. It didn't work for me the first time. So the point I'm trying to highlight here is that you need a dense coloring of graphite for this to work. So the 2B, no good. And a really dense 6B is good. The next conductive material I'd like to demonstrate for you is a piece of fruit. So go ahead and duplicate our code and we're gonna be focusing on the right arrow this time. And let's switch the costume to the orange. They can go ahead and stick an alligator clip directly into the orange, but a nice little hack is if you attach a paper clip to the end of it and then you can just insert the tip of the paper clip into the sticky material. The cool thing about that is you won't need to clean your alligator clips when you get into some other conductive materials that I'll show you in just a sec. All right, firstly, go ahead and connect your two alligator clips to the makey-makey. Okay, so I've gone ahead and stuck the alligator clip and paper clip into the orange. I could just connect up the other alligator clip to our orange, but instead I'm gonna hold it. I'm gonna hold this end that is connected to the earth. And then what I'm gonna go ahead and do is tap the orange and hopefully we'll get a connection. Boom, and there's our connection. All right, let's check out water as a conductive material. Let's duplicate this code block and we're going to focus on when the space bar is pressed. Now we wanna switch to the costume water when that happens. You'll see here, I've got a glass that I've set up and I've just got some paper clips on the edges of the glass that you can see here that I'll connect the alligator clips to. And on the inside of the glass, we've got an extended part of the paper clip running down. So I'm gonna fill this glass with water and when we get a connection, when the water level reaches the height of the two pins, we should get a connection. All right, it should be pretty comfy with these alligator clip connections now. I've got the yellow one here connected to the space bar and the other one connected to the ground. I've also connected them to the ends of paper clips. And this is interesting itself because you'd think if glass is conductive, we should have a connection here, but glass is not conductive. What I'm gonna do now is pour in some red colored water and we should get a connection when the water level rises to the height of the paper clips. And there we go, connection. We've just about used all of our arrow presses and the space press, but now I wanna go ahead and demonstrate this click press. So how are we gonna do that? Well, in scratch, we've got the access to when this sprite is clicked half block in our vents. So what this will refer to is when the connection sprite is clicked, set off a sequence of instructions. So currently, if the water glass is clicked, so we can just go ahead and duplicate the same couple of instructions that we're using for the others. And we can now set this to Play-Doh because that's what we are going to demonstrate now. Now it's very important that we leave the mouse over the water, otherwise this will not work. All right, so everything said, our mouse is on the water glass and now we've got our Play-Doh character here with a white alligator cable connected to the click connection of the makey makey and our other character is connected to the earth connection. So what they can go ahead and do is if they go in and hold hands, they should result in a connection. So here we go. And there we go. Connected. Notice here that we've got lots and lots of cables everywhere. We can sort of simplify what's going on here by removing all of these earth connections and leaving one. What we're going to do is use some foil which is also a great conductor and I'm going to wrap this piece of foil around my wrist and connect myself to that earth connection. So I've got my tin foil bracelet connected with my alligator clip connected to it. I'm going to go through and touch all of these connections and see if they work. Let's try the copper tape first. Cool copper tape. Now let's try the pencil. Oh, we're on the, I just nudged the play-doh there. Let's touch the pencil. There goes the pencil. Let's touch the orange. Orange. And now I'm going to dip my finger in the liquid here and we're back to the water. So there you go. That are all the connections there with one connection to the ground. Let's review where we've been. Recall that makey makey is just like a keyboard or mouse. So you can use it with any device that supports a keyboard or mouse. Makey makey's work by completing circuits. Remember that you can just hold the ground pin, the base one down the bottom and touch any of the pin connections to complete a circuit. We can extend this idea of a circuit by connecting some wires or some alligator clips to it. We can then introduce multiple alligator clips or wires and connect those to conductive materials. If we touch one end of the conductive material and the ground, we should complete the circuit. It's time for a scratchy question and I want to know what crazy materials and objects did you use to complete your circuits? Drop your answer in the comment section down below. Thanks for checking out this makey makey tutorial. Be sure to smash that like button and check out some other content on your screen right now. If you want to show your support to this channel then you can head on over to my Patreon page. Check out some of these funky red bubble teas or consider joining the mailing list. All links below in the description. But until then, I'm off to go find a wave. I'll catch you in the next one.