Brainstorming Badges

My current project is creating community support for a set of badges based on different skills. This week, being the first week, consisted of a lot of set-up and brainstorming. In addition to the downloading/installing all of the development software, I also set up the databases in the community to hold the badges and populated fixtures (fake data for the test website).

General Musings on Badges:

• Badges would be (for now) divided into two categories: Skills (for loops, do togethers, other world-based badges) and Activity (shared first world, won a challenge, other community-based badges)
• Badges would be based on a ranking system
• each badge in the skills category would have a level and a difficulty. The level would be used to differentiate between complexity of use (e.g. a simple do together would be level 1 and a do together with a count loop inside of it would be level 2). The difficulty would be used in a suggestion system (e.g. After the user had so many of easy difficulty, then they would be suggested to try to earn a badge of medium difficulty).
• each badge in the activities category would increase in level by the amount of them you have (e.g. sharing one world is level one, sharing five worlds is level two, and sharing twenty worlds is level three)
• Skills Badges could be associated with the world, that way when someone was looking for a example of a do-together, they would be able to find a world to remix
• Badges would unlock prizes
• provides an extra level of motivation that the
• This could be anything from unlocking the ability to getting to another level of difficulty on badges to unlocking new scenes or characters. I’m leaning toward the former since the latter could potentially delay kids

Potential Skills Badge Ideas

• use of the action ordering boxes
• remixing a world

Potential Activity Badge Ideas

• submitting an entry to a  challenge
• winning a challenge
• sharing a world

Potential Prizes

• new characters
• new backdrops
• new tutorials
• this would potentially make tutorials a coveted item
• can submit a challenge
• can become a mentor
• can have a new profile picture

Paper Prototypes

Page One

a mock-up of several views where badges are shown on the worlds page. The top one details laying out every badge on the worldthe bottom one details ranking the world as beginner, intermediate, etc.  based on badges earned. It also shows a drop down where you could see the skills in the world

Page Two

• several different ways in which the badges could be represented
• the goal behind this was to find a way to visually represent that the combination of two constructs (e.g. a count loop inside of a do-together) is what increase the level of the badge

• several ideas for how the badges could be represented. The ones to pay attention to are the mushroom badge for activities (based off of Alice in Wonderland), the gears skills badge, and the badge that tries to graphically represent the for loop. The colors would change based on level

• a mock-up of what the user page might look like with badges. Note that the badges could go next to the name (very eye-catching) or under the “About” section. If you clicked on any of the badges, it would take you to a page explaining (or offering a tutorial) on how to earn the badge and showing you worlds that earned that badges
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• Page Five
• Another mock-up of the user page. This one just has the highest ranked badge of each category next to your name and then your stats under the “About” section. The stats would open to a “My Badges” page. Note that when looking at your own user page, there would be a notification telling you how many more badges you need to earn a certain prize
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• Page Six
• a mock up of a user’s world’s page. The skills earned in each world would be listed on the right. You could click on them to learn more about that badge
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