Makey Makey: Why is everyone talking about this electronic kit again?

Makey Makey is a DIY kit that has been in the market since 2012. It has an Amazon rating 4.6, and uniform high ratings across all selling and review platforms. The current upsurge in its popularity started in 2020, with coding, hardware and home electronics projects becoming extremely popular during the lockdown. Makey Makey started trending so much this year that it got sold out on Amazon and Flipkart several times since April. Let’s see why parents, students and teachers find it such fun.   

What is Makey Makey?  
Makey Makey is a hardware-based invention kit that encourages users to find creative ways to interact with their computers, by using everyday objects instead of a keyboard and mouse. It’s popular videos on Instagram and YouTube show people using a banana instead of a space bar, a staircase to play the piano, toy clay instead of a mouse, PPT slides moving every time 2 users do a high five, and other incredible projects. Of course, Makey Makeys signature crocodile clips and wiring connect these objects, from the banana to the stairs, with its circuit board.  

How was Makey Makey invented?  
MaKey MaKey was born as a student project by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, as part of their research at MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten programme. Their first experiment with Makey Makey in 2010 had participants creating a console game with a beach ball as a controller and water buckets as the foot-pads. In 2012, after several prototypes, Makey Makey was launched through a Kickstarter fundraiser campaign that got over $50,000.  

How does Makey Makey work?  
This is clearly a fun kit whose bizarre experiments are loved by teenagers and college students. But how does it work? The Makey Makey is a two-sided circuit board, compatible with the popular hardware kit Arduino. Makey Makey uses high resistance switching to detect when a connection is made with anything attached at the end of its wiring with the crocodile clips. The software built into the hardware board then communicates this signal with a computer using the Human Interface Device (HID) protocol, making the connected object work just like an input device, i.e., keyboard or mouse.