My second master course (Adapting Innovative Technology to Education) is coming to an end, so it is a good time to reflect on my learning journey in it especially how it affected my professional life.
Since my main interest revolves around computer science in K-12, I am involved in outreach events. In my current project, we use a friendly-to-code environment to introduce programming, Alice. In our next outreach, we prepared games and simple programming activities in using this tool. Although the concept is attractive, we need something more catchy to the young audience to have an impact on their view of Computer Science.
While taking this course, I came to try the Makey Makey (Finally!) and saw dozens of applications of this tool. The interesting part was to actually use it in Alice programming. So I presented the idea to my team: created a few games in Alice, and had some creative input using Makey Makey. They loved it! So we decided to use it for our outreach.
We used Makey in more than one way: Joystick, Horse riding game, and mouse & cat game. Let’s take the Joystick as an example, here is how I made it:
Also, here is how the other two games look like:
Here is a video of creative joystick in action. I took it of my colleague (as opposed to young students) due to permission issues.
Hanan Alshikh 