MakeyMakey Comics at the City Stories Festival

Two weekends ago I had the freeze of my life. Temperatures under 10C, something you'd expect in the end of May, right? It was my first workshop with Kunstpädagogische Aktion / Spielkultur e.V., who organises various art education activities for kids. The scope for this weekend's events was the City Stories Festival in Luitpoldpark, Munich, where Spielkultur has set up tents for different activities. Despite the whether, there were many children and even more parents, who were brave enough to confront what the skies had to offer.

I was leading a Makey Makey workshop on talking comics in one of the tents, where you could create a comic which would play back the dialogues when you touch it. So, as a first step we would develop a story with a small group of kids. Then they would draw the story in four pictures, colour it, outline the speech bubbles, and - here comes a twist - instead of writing down the text, they would just fill out these boxes with a soft pencil. We would then record the dialogues, link each audio file to a specific key via Scratch software and connect all the speech bubbles through Makey Makey. And here you go: a beautiful cable salad*, as we say in German! (*a cable clutter)

CityStories on Vimeo

It was a fun opportunity to talk about electricity with kids, and I wonder how I can unfold this topic even more in the future.

Other events at the festival included stop motion, painted cast fingers, improv theatre, book bindery and visits from various storytellers.