At first, I really had no clue what I was going to do for this assessment. I read the assessment details multiple times and couldn’t come up with anything. Luckily, I had a classmate of mine – Jess (check out her blog here! https://jessicasuann.home.blog/) – reach out to me (on the 24th September) and asked whether I wanted to partner with her to do this assignment. I was so thankful for this opportunity, as I honestly would have struggled immensely with this task.
When she first asked me this, we talked about some things we wanted our project to be. Initially, we thought it would good to create a great classroom resource that we could possibly use in the future. We also thought that maybe we could make a few instruments that we could possibly pitch; these instruments could either be used in the classroom or be made in the classroom.
In our tech class, we had to pitch our idea for our project. We had talked about it briefly, and decided that we would pitch our idea of making our own theremin, and creating a unit of study to go along with this. We then met up early October to get some good progress on the assessment. In this meeting, we had many thoughts and ideas flying around, and we ended up changing our original project idea. We decided we wanted to make a large floor piano and create a game (something similar to guitar hero) to use the piano with. We met up with James in special projects week briefly to talk through things, and ask whether it was possible to do. Luckily, we were told it was possible, and he even lent us a Touchboard to use for the assessment. He also suggested that we contact Rowena to help us out.
We contacted Rowena (who had visited us in a lecture for tech one week) to ask for her help with programming. We switched from using the Touchboard to using the Makey Makey (since Rowena was familiar with this over the Touchboard). She told us Scratch would be the best program to use to create our game. We continued to meet up throughout the end of semester to get work done. We also met up with Rowena, and she took use through the basics of what we needed to do. She also showed us how to reprogram the Makey Makey. Now, it was time for us to build our large scale floor piano! You can read about that in the next blog post…
Rachelle Pieri 