Use Makey-Makey to make a bat-mobile (or any other flying animal educational mobile. via instructables
For our Makerspace’s January build night, we worked with MakeyMakey kits. These kits are particularly well suited for working with the software program Scratch. Scratch allows you to link the circuits you make with your MakeyMakey with sounds, images, text and actions on the screen.
In my case, I recently took a trip to the Grand Canyon, where I had learned about the most common insectivorous bats that live there. I have a bat detector, and since it is a tool that works best when you know what frequencies each species of bat makes, I wanted a related tool that would help reinforce my ear for detecting the bats and their frequencies, while relating it back to the pictures of the specific bat. Kind of a museum exhibit for my own knowledge.
The project took me about 3 hours, but that’s because it took a while to find all the .wav files I needed and to cut out the bats themselves. The Scratch programming is quite simple and should be useable even for kids.
For this project, you will spend time programming the MakeyMakey, but you will also need to put together the physical set up of the mobile. Think ahead to what flying creatures you want to learn about, and identify a food source that works fairly well for all of them. Track down photos online of the animals and .wav files of each, and save those to your computer.
Here are the different items you will need:
Computer, printer, internet access & paper
.wav files of each animal (save these with useful names)
images of each animal (save these with useful names)
aluminum foil
scissors
glue stick
MakeyMakey kit
Scratch account (you can make this without a scratch account, but the account means you can save your program).
(I put a photograph here of my bat detector, but it is not necessary for this project. You can however find out how to build a bat detector online, and I recommend doing so if you like soldering and finding bats).
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