Parenting Month 99: Competitions

This past two months was marked by competitions in Taekwondo and piano. In taekwondo T moved up a division, while in piano this will be his last year in this age group.  So he did well in piano, but middle of the pack in taekwondo, where the differences between the kids who are really serious and everyone else is apparent.
In piano, we know that this is also the point where the easy progress ends and it starts to take serious work to get better.

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First time competing in a competitive ring at a Taekwondo tournament. As usual,smallest kid in the ring. #tkdfamily

A post shared by Louis L (@lluang70) on Mar 24, 2019 at 4:46am PDT

What is the point of competition? Especially at this age? There is the standard answers of the discipline of following instructions, of being able to see what it looks like to be good. It is an opportunity to socialize with kids who are doing the same things you are and that you will grow up with through the years.

The other thing that is starting is the concept of working up to something big.  In TKD, we spent three weeks of both some individual classes and more intense time with my son in preparing for the tournament.  Similarly for piano, the teachers are telling the kids that the competition is coming and they have to be more serious.  And the kids pick up on the fact that the adults are being more serious.  Also we spend time focusing on smaller things than normal.



Is it worth it? Sometimes, the attention to detail taxes the attention span at this point. For TKD, we can go through the whole thing, but we can only improve a limited number of points of improvement in a session. I suspect that piano is much the same.  The benefits is the idea that the details matter, and that you are preparing for more than doing as well as the friends you see in class every day or week, but you are up against a standard that you have not seen.  And then having to deal with the stress of the event itself where a very specific performance matters with no redo. And they should be very aware of the true quality of that one performance. The ability to handle yourself under the attention of a crowd is invaluable, regardless of the quality of the performance.

Using an Adafruit Circuit Playground as a Makey Makey fruit piano

One of the inspirations for the Adafruit Circuit Playground (CP) was the Makey Makey (http://www.makeymakey.com/), which provided a way to use touching conductive objects as input to a computer. Because of this, Makey Makey is commonly found in schools and maker faires as a means of connecting the world to electronics.

Because the CP has 8 capacitive pads, it should be possible to do something similar with the CP.  Using the serial monitor output, we can see what the CP registers through each pad, and set thresholds for an action, for example, lighting up an LED or playing a tone.

The first version of the Makey_cp used the Capacative touch pads directly to drive the LED and the speaker.  By observing the capicative touch pads on the serial monitor we can see that the steady state value of the pads was between 1 and 10.  Touching the pad increased the value to around 30, but often an adjacent pad would also increase in value as a finger affects the electric field around the adjacent pad.  So we set a threshold on the CP capacitive to 20 for use as a finger piano. In addition, we use the switch to turn on and off the sound.

The sound is tuned using the pitches.h definition file, which has the tones for each potential note. As the CP has 8 touch pads, this is enough for a full octave of a major or minor scale.

To serve as a Makey Makey, the pads need to be connected via alligator clips to something that can conduct electricity, such as fruit or a metal conductor. Because such objects have capacitance, the noise level on the CP touch pads increases.  In order to increase the signal from touching the pads, the person touching the pads should be connected to a power source, in this case we use alligator clips to the 3.3V out pad of the CP. This leads to the CP to detect a value of approximately 150.

Next, we attach alligator clips to the  eight capacitive pads and to fruit.  This creates a fluctuating reading around 20.  We find through the serial monitor that touching the fruit while connected to the 3.3V out leads to a capacitance reading of around 225. The threshold is then