My MaKey Makey kit from the insanely successful Kickstarter campaign arrived yesterday from Sparkfun! Today I got a chance to unbox it and do the initial test with my squirming XO Child on my lap holding the alligator clips to trigger the keyboard input and XO Mom taking the GIF animation frames. Success! Now we should be able to try the sample demos in Scratch on the HOWTO page and build the famous banana piano.

I can easily see larger OLPC deployments doing their own locally assembled batches of these open source hardware boards at cost. And it seems like C. Scott‘s XO Stick prototype (which I am preparing to assemble) should be able to offer some of the MaKey MaKey functionality at a substantially lower cost. Maybe we’ll see XO USB pianos around the world made from coconut, guava, mango, chinese pears and more.