Virtual School is a new and difficult journey, but we wanted to share this hack shared to our inbox from a longtime Makey Makey user, David! 

Zoom Hack!

David's little one is using Zoom for virtual meetings and she was having trouble staying engaged until.....

"I pulled out the Makey Makey and plugged in the space bar to an orange (Did you know Zoom uses space to unmute?) 

I threw some conductive tape on her chair, and now she has to sit in her chair and touch the talking orange to speak. Thanks for that. I don't use Makey Makey every day, but it's never not fun when I do."

You can set this up too and some schools are also using spacebar in Google Meet for muting/unmuting! Make sure you have this audio setting checked so that pressing space bar will temporarily unmute your microphone.

Zoom Desktop Settings

Under Audio, go to "Audio Settings"

Then make sure you have this setting checked. "Press and hold 'Space Key' to unmute." If you don't see it, click into "Advanced" to make sure this setting is on.

Then just hook a vegetable up to Space Key and make sure to set up an EARTH connection. 

We used a strip of HVAC tape as EARTH and a fresh nectarine for the Space Key input to try it out!

@makeymakeykit

Thanks to our ##MakeyMakey fans who shared this ##ZoomHack! Hook fruit to Space Key input and connect to Zoom! Hold the fruit to temporarily unmute!

♬ original sound - makeymakeykit

What fruit will you use to unmute?

Note: This works with Zoom Desktop, but doesn't appear to work on the current Chromebook extension or on a mobile device.