This past week we invited guests to come to The Tech Studio and interface paper switches with a computer game.
Visitors made switches with paper and copper tape. After creating them, they were able to test them by connecting them to a PicoBoard with alligator clips.
The PicoBoard hooked into our computers, controlling a game of Whack-A-Bot made in the programming language Scratch. Whenever guests closed their switches, they scored points and the corresponding robots in the game disappeared.
We saw some pretty innovative switches this week. Many guests made awesome paper fortune tellers, cranes, paper puppets, and so much more. And one guest even created a ball-machine-like switch!
The PicoBoard was developed by our friends at Sparkfun. And Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT .