Identifying and Managing Our Emotions With Makey Makey

In this instructable we will explain you how our students created an Accessible Audio Book for the students at school who had visual problems or were not prepared to read yet.

We used a popular book here in Spain that speaks about the emotions and help children to discover, identify and manage their feelings called The Colour Monster.

Supplies

Cardboard

Paint

Aluminium foil tape

Makey Makey

Cables with crocodile clips

Computer with internet access

Scratch

Step 1: Create the Book

We used these images from the author's webpage to inspire us to create the book. Then, we drew each one of the feelings on cardboard and painted them with the colour that represented them best.

Step 2: Add the Aluminium Foil Tape to Each One of the Pages

After having all of the pages of our book, we will have to add some aluminium foil tape to its sides that will work as the button to start hearing the audios of every page.

Tip! Make sure that it will not be touching any of the following pages or, afterwards, it will end by listening to all of the pages at the same time! :S

Step 3: Code the Voice Clips With Scratch

Scratch is an amazing coding community where children and people from all over the world share their creations.

In order to tell the Makey Makey what to say, we will use Scratch to create the code for it.

This would start by creating a user and logging into it, as you can see in the first image.

After this, we would click on CREATE a project, give it a a name and find or create a character that they liked.

Once we have started the project, we will create the audio clips. It is really important that our students choose before the sprite/character they will be using as the audio sticks to that sprite, if they deleted it afterwards, they would lose everything they had recorded.

It is also important when recording the audio to name it with numbers or somehow they will, afterwards, be able to order it when they are coding the story.

Once finished, they start coding it by adding an event: "When space key is pressed" and then, another one that says "Play sound..." and choose the audio clip you will be using there.

In our coding, you will observe that is says "Switch backdrop", as our students prefered to work with backdrops rather than with sprites, so we kept the sprite hidden (you can observe how to do this at the first part of the coding) and they changed the backdrop every time they changed the page.

Step 4: Add the Makey Makey and Have Fun!

Add the Makey Makey, adding its crocodile clips to the parts where the book has the aluminium foil, bearing in mind to connect each part to the coded one, so that electricity can be driven through each page of the story.

Do not forget to connect as many Earth Cables or Wires you need so that it will work smoothly.

Check that everything works correctly and start sharing your project!!!

You've done a great job so go to different classes to share your story with everyone and help them identifying and managing their feelings!! :)

Ps. Don't forget to self and co-assess the students through rubrics!! That will help them improve and learn from their mistakes! A useful and time-saving way to create them is by using the Google Spreadsheets complement named Corubrics.