How to Add Your Instructable to Our Makey Makey Community Hub

I'm Colleen Graves and I write the majority of the guides you see posted under the Makey Makey account. Our team is so stoked to have a community here on Instructables, and I wanted to share how you can add your own teacher guides to our new Makey Makey hub! This Instructable will share all the information that Becky Stern, Tom Heck, and I shared as part of a webinar series for Makey Makey. Check out this guide to learn expert tips on posting great guides here on Instructables, learn more about the new Teacher community, and how to add your own guides to our Makey Makey hub.

We hope it sparks more ideas for using Makey Makey in the classroom!

Teachers can use any guide on Instructables in their classroom, but the new Teacher community has guides written by teachers for teachers!

Creating Your First Guide

If you are new to Instructables and want some tips on creating your first Instructables, Becky shared some great resources that are right here on this site:

• How to Make an Instructables Class by Jessy Ratfink
• Featuring Checklist
• The Clinic is a great place to share your guide and get some constructive feedback.

Adding Teacher Notes to Existing Guides

Did you know you can add teacher notes to existing guides? Here is a great resource explaining the process. I recently added a student organizer to my Doll E 1.0 guide. I love being able to add a teacher note to any guide in Instructables, it's a cool way to share with other educators how I used the guide in my own classroom. For the Doll E guide, this student organizer will help students with a design thinking element for the Doll E project. They can design a toy for a friend and take their needs into consideration when creating for a specific person.

Adding to our Hub

To add a guide to our Makey Makey hub, you just have to make sure you include Makey Makey in the title. Each guide with the term Makey Makey will come to an admin page and your guide will then be reviewed and placed on our hub.

Our company is mission driven and we believe in the power of play! We love open ended projects that help guide students so they feel successful, but has an element of openness that allows kids to express themselves and take the project further. We believe a great project has a low floor (it is easy to start), a high ceiling (it can get really complex if a student wants or can scale in complexity based on new knowledge or growth), and wide walls (it allows for many pathways to get from the floor to the ceiling!)

Read more about wide walls from Mitch Resnick here.

Here are some guides that we think contain these concepts!

• Biography Bottles by Kimberley Boyce and Bradley Quentin: This is a great project for elemakers who want to add research to making and coding.
• Tiny Museums- by Kathleen Fugle
• STEM in the Gym Challenge by me (inspired by Eric Turrill)
• Makey Makey Cardboard Slider by Always Computing aka Matt Moore
• Makey Talking Book by Nathan Sekinger

Each of these guides has enough guidance that a student can feel comfortable getting started, but can also explore many possibilities in their route to their creation. We also think these guides are easily scalable for adjusting complexity for the age of student you teach.

We can't wait to see the Instructables guides you share! If you are new to Makey Makey and you need a beginner guide to get started, check out this activity called "Sketch it! Play it!" You'll draw your own circuits and if you want to code those drawings, you can get started quickly in Scratch.