Made by MIT
Clocky, Makey Makey, Guitar Hero, and Scratch began as Media Lab experiments that asked what ordinary objects could do.
Familiar tools for play, learning, and waking up began as Media Lab experiments. A chronically oversleeping graduate student built Clocky, an alarm clock that rolls off the nightstand and hides, so shutting it off requires getting out of bed. Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum developed Makey Makey in the Lifelong Kindergarten group, turning bananas and Play-Doh into keyboard keys. Guitar Hero began as an exploration of digital tools to help people with no musical training play songs. Lego-funded research produced programmable bricks, released as Mindstorms in 1998. Later, Mitchel Resnick's group built Scratch, where children assemble code like blocks and remix one another's projects. Each asks the same question: what else might an ordinary object be persuaded to do?