Ever wanted to move Pac-Man using pencil drawings, make music with bananas or type an email with alphabet soup? Now you can thanks to Makey Makey, a simple circuit board that turns almost any object into a computer key ().
鈥淚t works with anything that is a little bit electrically conductive,鈥� says , a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 鈥淭hings like food, Play-Doh and lots of different metallic or organic materials.鈥�
In its simplest form, Makey Makey plugs into a computer via USB and lets users reassign the arrow keys, space bar and left mouse click to objects. All you have to do is connect one end of a wire to the circuit board using a crocodile clip and the other end to your new computer key.
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Holding another wire attached to the board and touching your chosen object completes the circuit, triggering the 鈥渂utton press鈥�. No software is required and more advanced users can reassign other keys and mouse motions.
Rosenbaum and his colleague hope their easy-to-use kit will encourage anyone to start inventing things for themselves. They have set up a on fund-raising website Kickstarter to fund a large production run, making it cheap enough for use in schools.
