This project is easy to get kids into learning about the basics of electricity and circuits all while using the wonderfully easy Makey Makey

Step 1: Materials

Various colors of pipe cleaners
A Makey Makey
Processing (click here for a download link)
Copper wire
Some creativity

Step 2: Make Your Animals

First, choose which animals and how many you would like to use. For simplicity's sake, we decided to make four simple animals. An elephant, a bear, a tiger, and a pig. These animals do not have to be made out of pipe cleaners, but it works well with the copper wire. You can make more than four animals if you like, but this requires a little bit more work on the coding end as well as the physical end. Wrap a small piece of copper wire around each animal, leaving a small end for an alligator clip.

Step 3: Put Together the Makey Makey

Put an alligator clip on each of the arrow keys
Put an alligator clip on the grounded part of the Makey Makey
Connect the grounded clip to a bracelet made of wire, worn by the user
Optional: Connect more clips to letters on the back, the spacebar, or the mouse click for more animals

Step 4: Write the Processing Code

Or perhaps just take the one I have here. Included is the code, the pictures used, and the sound files used. Here are some tips for adding new animals:

When adding more, be sure to add new pictures and sounds into the project folder
Code-wise, you must create a new variable for both the image and sound
The rest is pretty basic. By following the skeleton set by the rest of the code, an easy copy-paste job can be done to make new animals. Just be sure change it for the new animal.