Jack has been working hard on his science fair project for the last month. He had a difficult time coordinating with the school schedule to get data from fellow orchestra students, but in the end he put together a really great project. He measured the decibel levels of the orchestra stringed instruments to see which was the loudest.

Recently Sam’s class had another Makey-Makey STEM unit. They built talking boards. He immediately came home to make his own. He noted how great it was that I had cardstock and even metal brads in our office supplies, and Scratch Jr coding already on his home chromebook – it helps to have a crafty mother and nerdy father.

He demoed the board to Ben, and then he lost the data on his computer before I could see it. Poor guy was disheartened. Kids these days rely on auto-save too much! Meanwhile, I had been 3d printing cases for the classroom Makey-Makey sets. When I got a new printer bed (it had cracked), I made a case for Sam’s Makey-Makey out of special glow-in-the-dark PLA filament.

That gave him the motivated he needed to rebuild the code. Once complete again I had him give me a full tour of his project: