Which Animal is Coolest?
February 28th, 2006 by MarkOne new thing I have to do for my first and second grader classes is to make some point cards. I give points to all of my students. I don’t give them any physical item, though. I just tell them when I give or take points, and I post their rankings on the wall, every class. They all know how many points they get or lose for any given homework assignment or test, and it’s kind of a waste of time to give them anything. Those are big kids. Little kids aren’t like that. Sure they look at the rankings each class and listen to my motivational speeches, but it’s not enough. If I REALLY want to motivate them, I have to give them some physical item that they can collect and hoard inside their pencil cases. Fortunately for me, other schools have long ago found the solution to this problem- point cards.
I spent about 4 hours today making .gif files of pictures to put on the cards. Fortunately, I was able to find most of the art I needed in the public domain. I tried to get a mix of really cartoony and less cartoony pictures. After that, it was just a matter of re-sampling the pictures to the right size (I used a lanczos 3 algorithm), editing them to be a bit cuter, and labelling them. I tried to make the “cooler” animals worth more, but I’m not completely sure what’s cool to Chinese kids. Local readers, I’d love your input on this. Here’s my preliminary layout of animals to use:
The rabbit, the pig, and the elephant need to be resampled. That’s why they’re a little fuzzy. Also, do you think the lion looks too serious?
Update: Resampling complete. Lancoz 3 worked much better than spline did.
:
February 28th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
for higher value cards, you should definitely have a tiger or panther in there somewhere. maybe other animal of “certain potency” like rhino or bull or bear. these animals seems to associate well with most chinese. definitely keep the dragon…the picture of western type of dragon will be a good example that dragons can look different.
February 28th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Thanks, Warren. I was thinking about a tiger, too. Would you replace the lion, or have it in addition to the lion? I can’t really increase the number of cards; 10000 points is already an awful lot. I’ve also been thinking about replacing the spider with a cockroach. What do you think about that?
March 1st, 2006 at 12:06 am
Kids might have very different ideas to what animals they think are cool. So instead of ranking the value of each animal by its “coolness degree”, which is disputable, you might want to consider the quality and color/satuation of the pictures a little more. (Unless you also want to teach them which one is cool and which one is not) But if you think the dragon must be cool, don’t pick a picture that represents cuteness. And I would say the spider and lion are more valuable in this case, while the rabbit is definitely not, because it looks fuzzy and wimpy, sort of.
Does this help?
March 1st, 2006 at 12:14 am
how about instead of the cockroach, use the ubiquitous gecko? although ‘cockroach’ would be a better word to have in someone’s vocab. i would also keep the lion. how fast do the points accrue? maybe add a 20-point card.
March 1st, 2006 at 2:52 am
Warren- The kids get anywhere from 5 to 20 points per class. Once they start taking tests, it could go up to 40 or so on the days they get their tests back.
Kim- How’s Beijing? Also, is my blog still blocked on the mainland?
I had meaner looking animals before, but I got some negative feedback about them. Some of the students, girls especially, refused to take the old cards. I don’t care if the spider’s cute, because they aren’t supposed to like 1 point cards very much. I’ve gotten mixed feedback about the lion. Since you and Warren both seem to have positive things to say about it, I guess I’ll keep it.
March 1st, 2006 at 3:43 am
I ran the spider through a filter to reduce its color complexity and eliminate the highlights. Now maybe it looks more like a 1 point card. The old spider is still archived.
March 1st, 2006 at 10:08 pm
No, toshuo.com is not blocked, but your old blogspot url is, still. I just started a blog last week but I can never view it because it’s from blogspot too. Look how silly I am.
Good to see you making good progress with the teaching. Now come to think of it, the dragon does look like it has 10000 points. These cards make sense now, at least to me
March 7th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Well, I have a not so cool news update. My school has decided not to use ANY of the cards I spent hours making, EXCEPT the dragon. They got somebody else to get even “cuter” cards, which I think look downright pansy. My hours of re-sampling and editing these pictures were wasted. Grrr…