Peanut Butter & Jelly Lab—2012

Made with:
MaKey MaKey board  ⁄  Actionscript 3.0  ⁄  Peanut butter  ⁄  Jelly

For this interactive project, test participants would create a peanut butter sandwich. Along the way their choices (between smooth or crunchy peanut butter, grape or strawberry jelly, etc.) were recorded, and at the end they could print their testing results, as well as statistics about the sandwich they made compared to previous testing participants.

The system works using the principles of binary numbers; a single variable follows each test participant, choosing a plastic plate adds 1, choosing a paper plate leaves the variable unchanged. Choosing wheat bread adds 2, chosen smooth peanut butter adds 4, grape jelly adds 8 and a diagonal cut adds 16 (while the other option in each case leaves the variable unchanged.) With this system, all 32 possible combinations would generate each number from 0–31, while only one of the two options needed to be rigged for detection.