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Ever wanted to move Pac-Man using pencil drawings, make music with bananas or type an email with alphabet soup? Now you can thanks to Makey Makey, a simple circuit board that turns almost any object into a computer key (see video here).
"It works with anything that is a little bit electrically conductive," says Eric Rosenbaum, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Things like food, Play-Doh and lots of different metallic or organic materials."
In its simplest form, Makey Makey plugs into a computer via USB and lets users reassign the arrow keys, space bar and left mouse click to objects. All you have to do is connect one end of a wire to the circuit board using a crocodile clip and the other end to your new computer key.
Holding another wire attached to the board and touching your chosen object completes the circuit, triggering the "button press". No software is required and more advanced users can reassign other keys and mouse motions.
Rosenbaum and his colleague Jay Silver hope their easy-to-use kit will encourage anyone to start inventing things for themselves. They have set up a campaign on fund-raising website Kickstarter to fund a large production run, making it cheap enough for use in schools.