The Badge System

More random thoughts.

Categories

We should decide upon categories. I think we may want to distinguish between categories that are awarded automatically (e.g., you've created 100 images), categories that involve some automated analysis (e.g., you've completed 10 system challenges), and categories that involve human/administrative intervention (e.g., had your image selected as an image of the week by the administrators). I think in many cases, we also want scale/levels (e.g., you've done this 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times). Some things may be easy to hack (e.g., I can create 1000 images pretty quickly), but we should allow that.

• Create images. (10, 100, 1000)
• Create albums. (Say, five)
• Solve all of the basic static greyscale challenges.
• Create challenges (5, 25, 100)
• Administrator selected your image as a top image (1, 5, 10)
• Administrator selected your challenge as a top challenge (1, 5, 10)

Where they appear

I think badges should appear on each user page, rather than as a separate thing you have to click on. Isn't that the point? But we can have a page that describes the badges.

Badge icons

Once we've decided upon the badges, someone needs to make icons. I'd say that levels can be represented by colors or size.

Research

Someone (probably Victoria) should look into what other sites (e.g., Kahn academy) do about badges and whether there is a literature of badge systems.