At the December Manchester CoderDojo, we had a session with Scratch, a MaKey MaKey and some tangerines. It was a game that we first played, then picked apart to understand how it worked, learning some Scratch coding (and some fundamental computational concepts) at the same time.

The idea was that the player had to play the “Jingle Bells” tune using the tangerines as keys, which were connected via crocodile clips to the MaKey MaKey board, which was in turn connected to the laptop via USB, and thereby to the Scratch program. One point was scored for each correctly played note. If you managed to get all the way to the end, you were congratulated with a fanfare!

It was a lot of fun, and a nice balance of hardware and software. The “Jingle Tangerines” Scratch project is available online here for you to look at, copy and modify.

The basic MaKey MaKey interface was used, i.e. the 4 cursor keys and space bar connections, making 5 in total, which was the total number of notes (C, D, E, F and G) in the Jingle Bells tune.

Have fun!