Penguin catches fish

Knitted glove puppet with hand-made sensors in flippers, controlling its on-screen avatar. 

See http://www.itknit.com for details: early prototype glove puppet used as game controller.

Vibrobot Saturday

Homage to Evil Mad Scientist.  We scuppered old motors from toy cars instead of using mobile pagers.  The manufactured track is from a Hexbug Nano set.

Flawed Code 39 scarf...

More experimental interactive knitting

But look here - someone managed to do it successfully a few years ago - LK lendorff.kaywa.com - with space invaders!

Knitted QR Code

Created for The Life Project

pH ART

A day at Chesterton Primary showing Year 2 kids how to make their own litmus paper using red cabbage.

Chop and boil the cabbage for 10 min, then paint the dark red juice onto blotting paper.  Leave it to dry, or warm very gently in oven.  When it's dry, you can cut it into strips.

Children painting with lemon and bicarb

Use the strips for testing various liquids - try milk, oven cleaner, lemon juice, baking soda, saliva etc.

The children numbered their strips and wrote down what they had tested.  When they went back to class, they did a presentation and explained how some things are acid, some are alkali and some are neutral.

Red cabbage litmus test strips 

At home, we used lemon juice, bicarbonate of soda and tea as finger paints.

Rude Cats

Clips from toy theatre project, using TAGS hidden in the puppets and an RFID reader in the cottage.  The cats make different comments depending on who approaches.  Lots of fun making puppets and voicing cats.

 

Using Processing to play audio files, triggered via Arduino (with RFID reader) connected through serial port.  The cats have a range of responses for each tag, so the output is randomised.  You can hear the same audio clip being invoked more than once so the sounds overlap.

Run marble run

Thanks to Renzo the Toymaker http://www.toymakingactivities.com/english/homepage.html for the original idea of making a marble run from cardboard.  

We built this one from cornflake packet, glue, sellotape.  Designing it was fun, testing it was better.

SuperMario gets real

Hard to explain ... but they set up their own Mario Kart Racing Game (inspired by the original) using toy cars, toy rockets for boosters (Bullet Bill), brio, lego and cushions for tracks and mushroom jumps, gold coins to collect and spiders to avoid.  It was an epic race with a lively soundtrack, requiring no consoles, controllers or screens.

Watching that spontaneous leap from virtual to actual was a profound inspiration for toy development, how to utilise embedded technology and how to avoid manufacturing more plastic ...

PaintJam

It started with a fishing game.  Transformed into an observation of magnets.  Became a snake chasing marbles.  Metamorphosed into an automated drawing tool... using metal balls.  Jumped out into ovenware and lost the motor.  Evolved until finally even the marbles disappeared and total human control took over.  Check the video.


PaintJam 2010 from Fiona French on Vimeo.