Tag Archives: BANANAS!

Well, the second day of BANANAS! was as enjoyable as the first!

The banana synth was as popular as on the Saturday – the only thing we changed there was to replace some of the blacker bananas. We did tweak a few other things elsewhere though…

Being 2 members of staff down, we couldn’t run the BANANAS! Adventures movie-making activity – but it did mean that the Monkey Maze saw a lot more action.

Masks too, of course:

Once suitably attired, our intrepid trained monkeys entered the perilous maze, ready to be guided around the numerous hazards. That was the plan, anyway: it was interesting to watch how one dad’s idea to send a monkey under the ginormous spider’s web propagated throughout the rest of the day!

This became so much of a thing that some trained monkeys became deaf to any instructions that seemed to be guiding them in any other direction!

Meanwhile we had a couple of extremely dedicated MaKey MaKey tinkerers. We really liked their systematic exploration of all that was possible!

We learned a lot too – for example the grounding properties of the building itself!

Over at the video game area, we had set things up so that the trigger pads for controlling the monkey we some large tin-foil patches taped to the ground just that little bit too far away from each other.

It was great watching families and other groups (we had a Brownie six(?) in at one point) figuring out ways to work together to play the game.

We loved the way this introduced more team-working, creativity and movement.

I think these are my two favourite images from Sunday:

All of our photos and videos from the day can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/manyandvaried/sets/72157634923469089/

Wah-hey! That was fun!

We spent the afternoon at The Public running a series of drop-in activities themed around fruit and technology. There may have been a few monkeys, too…

BANANAS! takes over the Long Room at The Public

We’ve uploaded photos and videos from the day to this Flickr set. Below are but a tiny selection to give you a feel for the day…

Greeting people as they entered the space was our banana synth. We had a few stars happy to have a tinkle, as well as others who explored playing music via their face; seeing how many bananas they could trigger at once (this also required use of the face); and how long a chain of people they could use to play notes.

We had a good selection of monkey masks made, and when suitable kitted up, trained monkeys were sent into the perilous maze to avoid the dangers and try and find the banananananananas of myth and legend.

We also had a table full of experimentation with MaKey MaKey circuits, pencil traces and pineapples.

Skills learned here were then transferred to a selection of monkey and banana-related video games that needed funkier controllers.

Meanwhile, various other bananas could be seen having various exploits around the building as people made some action adventure movies with them.

The good news is we get to do it all again tomorrow between 11 and 2. Come and join us – we think the banana synth alone is worth the journey!

This page give extra information for the BANANAS! event a The Public in August 2013.

Things we used:

MaKey Makey

MaKey MaKey board

This is the little gadget that we used for the Banana Synth and the game controllers, it helps you make all sorts of different things into touchpad controllers.

Here is their website: http://www.makeymakey.com/

Games

Here are links to some of the games we played with our MaKey MaKey controllers:

• Monkey Stack
• Jumping Bananas
• Banana Rama
• Mico Maco
• Rain Forest Adventure
• Monkey Jump
• Picking Bananas

Training your Monkey

Here is a Monkey Language sheet for you to download and print.

The inspiration for this activity came from Dr Techniko.

Things you can try at home:

How to tattoo a banana

Step-by-step instructions for how to make cool designs on a banana.

5-minute ice cream

A fabulous way of making your own ice cream!

Banana recipes

If you have more than 5 minutes and want to make some banana-based food, how about trying one of these BBC recipes?