Today marked another free, fun, and family-friendly Scratch Day organized by Michael Tempel of The Logo Foundation. This season’s event was held at The Computer School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Tracy Rudzitis and her awesome students generously, graciously, and smoothly facilitated throughout. More information can be found on the Scratch Day website here: www.logofoundation.org/scratchday
My particular workshop was something I’ve led many times before. Today was special, though, as Stephen Lewis provided FunkeyFunkey boards and sensors for us to use and was available to help and troubleshoot when needed. Here’s the description from the program:
Scratch, Cardboard, and FunkeyFunkey Musical Instruments
FunkeyFunkey is a microcontroller board – just like MakeyMakey – that allows you to use every-day objects and materials such as aluminum foil, playdough, and bananas to interact with your Scratch projects. We’ll construct cardboard shapes, add conductive elements, connect them to FunkeyFunkey, and program different instruments, sounds, and notes using Scratch to play music and form a band! Audience: People of all ages (children under 8 years old should bring a parent or older sibling to help out) no prior Scratch experience is needed.
Steven (@inventionlab), created the FunkeyFunkey as part of his Make!Sense line of reasonably-priced and accessible micro-controllers and sensors. It’s a pleasure to be able to purchase great tools from Stephen, as he also provides assistance, resources, information, and local delivery! The FunkeyFunkey Simple is only $9.95 and the FunkeyFunkey Sensor starts at $29.95 plus whichever sensors you purchase. At The Brearley School, we invested in class sets of FunkeyFunkey Sensor boards, Infrared (IR) breakbeams, hearbeat sensors,tilt sensors, three different kinds of touch sensors, and a bunch of his well-designed alligator clips.
Finally, below are some pics from Tracy’s awesome Makerspace at The Computer School. Tracy is such a rockstar, and if you try to gush about her or the magic that happens in her classroom (which I do often), she’ll always say, “It’s not me, it’s the kids!”
Karen Blumberg 