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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!
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Bloggers & The Club Penguin Island Team
Here are random thoughts which I could not figure out how to structure and I just wanted to share. I’ve wanted to make this post for a while on how the Club Penguin Island team could influence and help bloggers.
Firstly, this is not for my personal gain as I suspect some people will think. Everything I say here should be for ALL bloggers, and I apologise in the event which I’m unintentionally biased.
Side note: I did some research for this post. I found nothing but I did see all these old blogs. Wow. Just, so nostalgic. The WordPress.com old blogs that were so simple. Wow. Take a look at this page by Saraapril if you’re interested. Okay, let’s begin with the actual post and things I don’t expect to happen.
Did you know that in 2005 you could submit your fan-blog to the comments on the Blog and he would review it. Sometimes, he would even put a link to it on the official website! As you can see above, this didn’t work out for the reasons blog could place swear words for other kids to see. But this was the start of supporting fan-bloggers.
Credit to Best CP Cheats for this image from May 30 2010 Some lucky bloggers even received exclusive stuff in the mail. Once again, something I don’t expect to happen. Unfortunately throughout last year one blog constantly received exclusive pins, but I still don’t think that this will continue anymore. The point is, the team have previously taken fan blogging as a big deal, but I feel it’s not so much of a priority anymore. I mean, they used to show fan-blogs to new recruits. Let’s look at things which I feel could realistically happen. Commenting on posts.
Club Penguin Memories, November 16 2013 I trust the team when they said that they read fan-blogs. It would just be really cool if they occasionally left comments on a post – particularly those which are opinion/discussion/idea based and not really news posts. It could just be something to address that post. Since interaction has returned on Twitter, people have been happy, but imagine interaction on fan-blogs!
Creating a WordPress account to follow blogs too would be great. This happened by Polo Field in 2014 and it literally made me so happy when he followed mine! Now, don’t get me wrong, I completely believe that they read fan-blogs. But I’d like to give some more ambitious ideas which I feel could possibly happen.
Twitter, 9th July 2014 I don’t think fan bloggers ever got access to this support team email but I will talk about this in a bit. Why not now though? It’s never too late. Here’s my main idea. It kind of ties in as to how Billybob used to give bloggers “packs” to use back in the day.
The team take a sneak peek. Let’s use igloos for example. It’s a basic image, but the team simply cut it into a few pieces. These are then distributed to fan-bloggers who can only post their image – they can’t take post others.
It’s up to everyone else to then piece the image together and form a proper sneak peek. After a few days, all bloggers can post the full image. I’ve scaled down this idea from just giving content-creators a look at new stuff to post a week before the update. This would build up hype – it’s what mobile games like Clash Royale do. This would still be amazing though.
So how would it work? Firstly, if you do choose to take part in this “scheme”, there needs to be a non-negotiable, published for all to see criteria involving no favouritism, which I will discuss in a bit. Here’s my idea of a criteria containing three basic things:
- Follows the Club Penguin rules (no inappropriate language, cheating programs etc.)
- Has been blogging for at least six months
- Cannot break any rules/terms laid by the Club Penguin team
Audience would be hard because that would once again bring back favouritism. Also, some blog types have a different view counting, which would make it more unfair. This is all about removing unfairness!
So how does the Support email tie into this? Well, firstly, it would be an easy way to clear up any uncertainty by knowing you’re talking to someone who knows about this scheme. But also, back in 2016, Megg said exclusives to a large blogger without anyone knowing until it was leaked from her personal email. She publicly posted this so I assume it isn’t a problem me sharing this to benefit the discussion.
Megg’s image captioned with “Please read” – 8 Feb 2016 I don’t want to use this as a negative, but I will say that favouritism should not happen with any scheme that takes place. Instead…THERE IS HOPE FOR THIS IDEA! Megg said that it was a trial and that they wanted to compile a list of bloggers which they could share exclusive information with.
It’s been over year. The team must have got passed the planning stage now. Club Penguin has a history of hiring the best Community Managers and this is not an exception. I would really like Megg to make this official and really turn it into a reality.
That being said, I do want to give my idea of how I would compile this list. I would make some form that opens once in Summer and once in Winter for a week. Something simple – your penguin name, email, blog with a few details about it and whether or not you agree to the published criteria.
The team then get back to everyone with this special email and explain if they have been accepted or declined. The list is then made with people being put randomly in order. Something (whether it be a full image or a piece of an image) gets given to every blogger who meets the criteria. They go down that list ensuring everyone gets something before the list restarts and maybe the form is opened again, depending on how they do it.
This would be my idea to support bloggers. Commenting on blogs, a great start! But this sneak peek system would be more than “just cool”. I would put it as “ideal”, not really “essential” though you could argue “necessary”.
If you disagree, please do leave a comment! This post took a while to make. Let’s hope that the team can make this happen!
Waddle on!
