There’s something about teenage boys and an obsession with weapons and war-games. My students had been building all sorts of crazy machine guns lately, so I decided to try to harness that interest by challenging them to create laser-cannons. We combined several different littleBits with the guns made out of K’nex to create different types of lasers.
We found that both buttons and roller switches worked great for triggers. We used copious amounts of scotch tape to attach our bits to the K’nex. We also used some tape to mute the buzzers so that they weren’t too loud for kids studying in the library.
To create the laser light, we used long LED bits. There was also a lot of wire involved, and we used a fork to activate more than one bit at once. Later, we added a pulse so that the light would flash when the button was pressed.
My students are now talking about setting up a laser tag game in the library. Not sure how this’ll work, but we’ll see 🙂