The Educational Side to Club Penguin Island

The parents page of Club Penguin claimed that such an enjoyable virtual world was actually educational, that players could even learn mathematics from it. Whether or not that is actually true, it’s unlikely, but the point is that Club Penguin always likes advertising themselves as educational. Let’s turn that concept into a Club Penguin Island reality…

Firstly, you get your classic “you have to work to get your coins and spend them wisely ” concept and that is relevant. It’s not what I want to focus this article on but still something I would like to discuss in just one paragraph.

I’m max level and that took 40 days to earn. But ultimately, I had to do everything from doing each Daily Challenge and doing each adventure. Others were there to help. But I don’t feel like this really pushes it enough to consider the game even slightly “educational”, nor does spending your coins since it is common to have currency and to choose how to spend it.

So then what makes Club Penguin Island stand out? What makes it more educational compared to its competitiors, allowing the world to stand out on app stores with a solid example of a reason why this game is educational in a unique way? The answer: catalogs

This is what I’m most excited for in the 1.2 update coming this month, the ability for us to create our own catalogs to “sell” to other people. The opportunity to enter contests. This is just for clothing, imagine when Igloos come out and Rory is a catalog then (which will be happening by the way).

However, what does “sell” mean? Here is my idea which I am extremely hopeful will come to the game. You are essentially designing a product from scratch and selling it. What is the incentive for a player to do such a thing? 💵

Money, or in this case, coins! Here’s an example:

For the seller:

• You design your item using whatever decals and fabrics are available to you at your level. It should be relevant to the themes
• You put you decide what price to sell your item. It must cost at least what it took to make, which would be decals, fabrics and the blueprint itself all added together. If it’s too expensive, no one will buy it, but if it’s too cheap, you don’t get many coins, just like in real life.
• You get to put your item on the store at an extra cost of around 20-50 coins per item.
• You end up getting about 20% of profits.

Example: You use the “Top Dog” blueprint, leopard fabrics and CP decal. This altogether costs 120 coins plus the say, thirty extra coins to put it on the store. 150 coins. Now you decide how much profit you want and you decide that to be 20 coins. The cost of your item is 170 coins and you get 4 coins each sale.

1000 people buy it and when the themed event ends you get 10% of the profits, as such making you 4000 coins at the end of the event. Not a bad deal!

For the Buyer:

• You browse through the most popular items and you don’t like any of them, so you switch modes into showing random designs
• You decide you want a leopard outfit so you narrow down your options by using the filter button, choosing the “Top Dog” blueprint and the leopard fabric. You find the one you want
• Since you are the same level or a higher level than the seller, you can buy it
• You pay the 170 coins the seller asks for it and the item is yours

Granted, this method would need tweaking as it plays out and the 20% profit is simply a guess of how to balance it fairly. It could be more, it could be less, but I hope you get the overall idea.

This would not only be EXTREMELY fun but would encourage creativity and allow Club Penguin Island to advertise the app as more educational. It’s something I would really hope to see and you never know, maybe this is already the case! We’ve not been told if those who sell items will get coins for it but hopefully this will idea will be taken into consideration.

Before concluding this post, thank you to Superqami. We spent some time discussing these ideas and it was pretty fun to put them all down in a post. Thank you very much for reading this and if you like it, feel free to email the team with this idea.

Waddle on!

-Torres 126

PS. I’m on holiday at the moment and this was pretty difficult to make since all I have is my tablet and a keyboard so that might be why there’s a lack of images/designs etc. I can really visualise how this would look but I would need a computer to show you. Have a great day!