#8 The Tournaments: Scaling Toy Box Challenges

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#8 The Tournaments: Scaling Toy Box Challenges

Postby goofyspaceranger » Fri Jul 22, 2016 12:09 pm

Glossary post #8 for "A Toy Box Tale: Recapture the Spark!"

The Tournaments
In the story, The Tournaments of the Toy Box Challenges, but not just those offered at a global scale. Consider the possible venues of Weekend Hackathons, Quarterly Club Contests, & Weekly Summer Camp Challenges. The Toy Box engine has shown itself to be simple enough, yet robust enough, to accommodate game creation in short & long durations of time. It also shown itself to be ideal for group collaborations. In these venues, Disney Infinity IDs would typically be purchased in groups, and would represent an institution, a public/private school or library, with its own interest in protecting its services to the community. In addition to be natural formations of one or more "Guilds", the lead volunteers of these efforts could supply legal documentation as proof of their roles to establish themselves as Infinity "Guardians". As part of their trusted role, they could hold their own local tournaments in whatever time frame that fits their venue.

Localized Contests, Global Recognition
Toy Boxes could have a new attribute denoting a Tournament placement that would not be limited to the world-wide challenges still run by the official owner. The Guardian IDs, as a trusted subset, could have the ability to update this attribute, that it would appear in community content, and even be an applicable search filter - e.g. you might not list the direct submissions of a Guardian; you'd instead list the winning Toy Boxes of a given Guardian's Tournaments. The Head Guardian would be the lead marketing ID of the owner, but the others could be a trusted set of fans around the world. Consider the adventure contest run by our own Sheriff back in 2.0 - consider how much better participation there would have been if he was a recognized Guardian vetter of content, that Toy Boxes he chose would be denoted as such in community content, that you could even get a playlist of Challenge-Winning Toy Boxes from Sheriff Woody? That would be cool. 8-)

A Better Chance To Win
As fantastic as the Weekly Challenges & Toy Box Master Artists works have been, they did not scale well. There was the obvious issue of Master Artists' works getting lost in a largely unfiltered DB, but there was a bigger issue, that among the millions of players around the world, winning a Toy Box Challenge was akin to winning a Lottery - not very likely. It would be important for the Weekly Challenges to continue, but providing localized versions provide kids a vastly better chance to win. In particular the Toy Box Reboot embraces the educational value of those Creativi-Toys in creative, collaborative, problem-solving storytelling, then the educational institutions can alleviate the vetting bottleneck, increase the volume & quality of community content, and even market your product on your behalf (and pay to do so). Look at what FIRST does with robotics. Look how idTech camps already leverage Minecraft. Recognize the value in the Toy Box engine. Recognize the shift in Comp Sci education toward elementary & middle school students. Empower educators to utilize the product, and you would not only get more community content FOR FREE, you would extend your vetting capacity FOR FREE.

Linking The Big & The Small
As the number of local clubs continued to grow, they could be grouped into regions that feed into one big, overall pool. There could be a longer-duration build, or set of builds where local Guardian judges appoint local winners, regional Guardians pick winners from those, etc. such that the Toy Box owner can choose the winner from a much larger pool. This could be a cool annual contest over a set of Toy Box builds for example. There could be cool club names, Toy Box T-shirts, medals, etc. with results made available in-game. This would all feed into the subscription-based model of Toy Box content that is created for free by fans.

Fun at the Faire
It's not all about competition either. Sometimes groups will simply enjoy demonstrating what they've built. Part of the thrill of building Toy Boxes is sharing them with all Disney Infinity players around the world. In addition to scaling out challenges with local "Guild" clubs, there's the fun in Maker Faires. There is a lot of momentum in the value of project demonstrations with STEM-related clubs, where students have early experiences with public speaking to share what they've built. It reinforces their knowledge of the concepts, and extends the collaborative experience in how these builders communicate the completion of their projects. It can be virtual with snapshots & video through Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube, and it can be at physical fairs as well, with snapshot hardcopies on a poster board, or shown live on a screen. It's the perfect ending to a Hackathon weekend, a week-long Summer Camp, or a Maker Faire presentation by an after-school club.

Coincidentally, our little Disney Infinity Toy Box Clubs here in the Hudson Valley have piloted seasonal library programs, an after-school club at a P-Tech school, a community-outreach hour-of-code event at a local college, and before the cancellation announcement, had plans for holding hackathons at the college in the fall. Our P-Tech club hosted its own hour-of-code with Infinity to the community, and also presented one of their Toy Box projects as a Maker Faire style demo at their local bookstore. All of these venues work really well. Students love this product (& if they don't own it already, they go home & buy it). Community leads & educators love this product - once you take a little time to show what the Toy Box can do. Think about the Toy Box Library as its own form of social media, with local Guardians providing these students a fun sort of social visibility, and then imagine how well that could scale. 8-)

Final glossary post: http://disneyinfinityfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=14320#sthash.96gOPgfj.dpbs
Use the Force in Holocron Heuristics to program with more Creativi-Toys!
 
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