Quick and easy DIY pressure plate switch for Makey Makey and Scratch

pressureplateswitchI have been working on Scratch programming with 3rd through 5th grade. Over the past few months I've posted my Flipped Classroom Scratch Lessons and about creating generative art with Scratch. Next, students studied the basic principles of electrical circuits and designed their own game controllers. I plan on posting some of my favorite schematics soon and will post photos/video of the student's game controllers once they're completed.

It took me about 3 minutes to make this DIY pressure plate switch to use with Makey Makey. The hardest part will probably be securing the wires to the sides, but hole punch through a card could be a simple solution. I'm not sure how this will hold up after days/weeks/months of use, but the cards are very resilient.

Below is a video in which I used three DIY pressure plates as drum triggers to make a simple electronic drum set. I used the free program Soundplant to map audio samples to arrow keys. Soundplant is low latency and works much better than Scratch for audio applications (shown in the last video).






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