**Update 15th July 2013 – yes you can**

Here’s proof:   //instagram.com/p/bysL98QElR/

If you’re interested, here’s how I did it.

*Here continues original post*

Listening to the Guardian tech podcast a few months ago, I heard about a certain kickstarter project that sounded pretty interesting. Called makeymakey, some clever chaps had built a way of allowing you to connect pretty much anything to a PC, and use it to control your PC, using some crocodile clips and a little USB motherboard. I was curious about the potential for this, so backed the project on kickstarter and received my kit a couple of weeks ago. Naturally my first thought was to bring it into the office to see what clever ideas we could come up with and apply to giving. Unfortunately, we didn’t come up with any especially great ideas (yet), although seeing David, our technical architect, using a banana as a joystick to play canabalt was a bit special: (Incidentally, in my MVT test of three fruits, bananas proved a more effective controller than apples or clementines. Test and learn. Test and learn.) Anyway, the kit allows you to connect anything that conducts electricity to the board, and control the arrow keys, space bar and click. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make a donation on the site using just those keys, but maybe we’ll add shortcuts so you can… But aside from donations on our website, could you think of any clever ways to use a makeymakey and apply it to giving and technology? I’m off to a Facebook hackathon tomorrow, and it would be a good time to try some of your ideas out… For inspiration, here’s the video from the makers of makeymakey. Enjoy.