This week in lab preparation, Diana and I worked together to come up with and execute our Makey Makey project. As of Monday night at 9:00, as we walked to our cars after Professor Watten’s class, we had inklings of ideas that spoke to research interests we share. As of 8:30pm last night, after almost three hours of spirited discussion, we had a fleshed out conceptualization of our project. As of half an hour ago, having spent the better part of the day actualizing a modified version of said conceptualization, we have a working prototype and, in my humble opinion, a super interesting line of inquiry for our demonstration to explore tomorrow night in class.

Per a mutual decision to retain surprise for tomorrow, I won’t go into detail here about our project. I will say, however, that we learned some painful lessons about turning an idea into a reality when combining hardware and software. While we were coding, I know I wasn’t the only one to experience frustration at something I thought would return a certain action completing failing to work. When Diana and I met in our office this morning and went to reconfigure the Makey Makey to control different keys than are defaults on the circuit board, we were immediately confronted with similar failure. It was like I’d come up with a block of pseudocode that couldn’t be converted to Javascript. Because I want to find meaning in the substantial amount of time we spent seeking out a fix to our issue this morning, I’m considering it an experience in interruption or breakage, which we talked about last class when Scott introduced possible goals for our projects (to make, extend, redesign, or break something). I certainly have a greater appreciation of the delicacy and intricacy of the circuit today than I did yesterday.