Blimey, that was quick! We added 50% more schools in just a week. It’s those quizzes wot did it, but the really cheering thing is the number of teachers who are now starting to experiment with quiz authoring for themselves.
Category Archives: Teachers' news
news for teachers
Yacapaca reaches 1000
Round about midnight last night we passed 1000 schools landmark on Yacapaca. Approximately 20% of UK secondary schools now have Yacapaca accounts. I’m over the moon.
Christmas Quizzes
This year, Mike and Miranda have replaced Christmas cards with Christmas quizzes, running on Yacapaca of course. They come in three flavours:
If you want to run them with your students, and are not already a Yacapaca subscriber, you can sign up here for free.
You’ll find some suggestions for using them with your students here
Enjoy!
How to explain Cricket to a Chinese illustrator
I’ve found an absolutely wonderful multimedia company in Hubei (where the Three Gorges Dam is) to create avatars for Yacapaca. They are quick, accurate, and very, very technically competent. Seeking to turn cultural difference to advantage, I asked them to suggest an initial set of characters, and back came the complete cast of The Monkey King. Brilliant. From anecdotal evidence, Pig is the most popular character to date (even in stats-obsessed Chalkface, we don’t actually measure this). So, full of confidence, I commissioned a couple of sporting avatars intended particularly to appeal to boys. The footballer was fine. Football is global, pretty much, and well understood in China. And then we came to Cricket. I hear you starting to chuckle already; you know what’s coming. Even with some fabulous action shots from Flickr and a simply sublime video of Imran Khan bowling out the opposition from Channel Dosti it has still taken them six attempts to get our hero plausibly bowled out in response to a wrong answer. The attached sketch is my latest and hopefully last attempt to explain the Noble Game to a still-mystified Chinese illustrator. But I am not the first to struggle with this. Ben reminded me of a famous attempt to explain Cricket to Americans:
Update 24/11/05: it took three more goes, with both sides getting increasingly frustrated. It turned out that “bails” is particularly difficult to translate into Chinese. Ho hum, they should be uploaded and available by Monday. Update 2 25/11/05: I nicknamed the footballer avatar George, in memory of George Best who died today. Not sure the kids will get it; I was in Yr 10 myself when Best was at his peak. |
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More Yacapaca statistics to boast about
This really crept up on us – those numbers are not reported in our admin pages so I only found out because Sergej thought on to tell me. I’m gobsmacked, frankly. I hadn’t realised how fast it is growing. (Sorry for the bad quality of the photo btw, it was taken with my phone, on an escalator in the Kiev metro. How’s that for pose value?) |
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