Grade 9 shadow-sensitive lanterns with micro:bits that change as visitors pass.

Year 10 have looked at Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Body Movies, where passers-by's shadows reveal hidden portraits, and Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, and discussed what changes when a viewer's presence becomes part of the work. Over four lessons each student builds a lantern from willow, card and tracing paper, sized to hold a micro:bit V2 and a battery pack, and codes the board in MakeCode to read the light level through its LEDs. They decide how the lantern answers a passing shadow: some fade the LED grid to a slow pulse, others switch to a pattern that echoes the lantern's own shapes, and a few add a soft tone from the board's built-in speaker. Students test with a hand, adjust the threshold until the lantern ignores ordinary daylight changes, and hang the finished pieces in the art corridor for a week, with each board counting how many times it was triggered. Each student ends with a 200-word statement on how the lantern's behaviour carries its idea.

Tools: micro:bit, MakeCode Nine ideas for your own version in Generate