This past week working on our Connected Messages mural I could sense that the leaving the theme topics a bit to open ended lead to more [adult] intervention in each kids work than I would like.
Our first day working on our mural we documented some of the kids running stories that play the line between humor, fantasy, and real life. However, after having a a mock viewing and eulogies for Uncle(and exhausting our inside jokes) it was hard to get motivated to create more or begin to delve into more serious topics.

This was all cleared up after diverting our attention to our Makey Makey contest entry for some fun and unintended inspiration. After trying to make some badges that one would “unlock” for completing our Group How-To(thank you techkim) we realized that we could use the badge sketching templates as a means of expressing ourselves on our mural. We unintentionally created a way to make patterns, display things we like, and even create our own achievement badges for what we have learned(something I have wanted to do since the start of this summer). It’s truly an awesome way for the kids to get work onto paper and who-knows we may scale and copy these bad boys to hand out at the Maker Celebration!

Jacob and Sameer (L-R), working on our entry website learning a bit about how HTML works.

“WATS YER NAME, MR KLEVENCE”

Badge revelation.

Our contest entry, due 8/13, still under development as of 8/7: Magnetic Makey Makey Mazes

Matthias testing our newly soldered FSRs with the Makey Makey and FFR!

Kevin learning how to solder and desolder.

Class #2 looking at different types of mazes

Game ideation!

Legend of Grandmom, pre-“Legend of Grandmom 2, with Grandpop”

I need to scan these bad boys in, panorama doesn’t do them justice!

This past week at the Village we kept developing our skills and started diving into our Magnetic Maze project. We went through one Soldering iron tip, half a spool of solder, and quite a few markers this week working on our skills. Plenty of fingers were singed in the process, but soldering LEDs into pairs is still a hit(led by Sameer & Jacob)!

This was a perfect start for us to begin playing with our Square Force Resistors and the Makey Makey for our FFR dance pad. Although our second iteration looked like it was going to work, we are still having many issues with materiality and time delays. This physical making exploration allowed us to begin working digitally in Scratch (with classes led by Josh, an Animation major from Art Institute also working in the Hot Spot) some sketches that can be found on the Villages scratch account!

All of this is leading towards our development of Maze Games that will be a mix of physical Squishy Circuitry and digital Scratch interfaces or games. We took a look at all the different types of mazes and puzzles out there (here is the presentation we went though) and talked our own experiences in corn mazes. Which started the generation and discussion of different game concepts, mechanics, and our hatred of helpless princesses in pink-dresses. Personally I can’t wait to see what direction everyone goes in making their own maze games, at the moment “The Legend of Grandmom 2, with Grandpop” is a running favorite.

Awsm video of the week, Sameer showing off his soldering skills: