Easily the greatest joy of this Kickstarter campaign -- apart from seeing those numbers and the friends' names roll in! -- has been having the tessellators of the world contact me. I was so thrilled to hear from Christopher Danielson, of Talking Math with Kids. I absolutely LOVE his platform: "Parents know they need to read at least 20 minutes a day with our kids. But teaching math to your kids doesn’t have to be intimidating. It can be fun. Just as children say goodnight to the moon, they can say hello to numbers, shapes and measurement." -- Christopher DanielsonChris created the Tessellating Turtles I've been raving about, as well as other non-turtled curriculum tools that I've been using with my kids at home. Here's Christopher's take on why tessellations belong in your lives. Q&A with Christopher: AKA the Tessellating Turtle Guy1. Where does your passion for tessellations come from? It started when my colleague at Normandale Community College, Kevin Lee, left a few scrap turtles lying around near the laser cutter. He was doing some beautiful inlaid woodwork with them. I took a few scrap turtles home, and I had them on the table on our front porch all summer. They were fun for me to tinker with while I worked out there, but I noticed that kids were especially drawn to them. Young children can see that they go together, but it's not at all obvious how. That experience led to them being a centerpiece of Math On-A-Stick—a large-scale family math event at the Minnesota State Fair. There, I watched hundreds of children a day make wonderful and creative patterns for 12 days straight. The interaction with the tessellation is what fascinates me. Of course I love Escher's work, and the beautiful images in your book. But for me, the process is always the most fascinating part. 2. What's so great about tessellations and why should we care about them? Geometry is about organizing space. Playing with tessellations is a fun and interesting way to play with organizing space in a particular way. The more opportunities children have to organize and structure two and three-dimensional space, the richer the ideas they'll form. There are lots of ways to get these opportunities—for example building with blocks, decorating doll houses, putting toy cars in garages, and doing puzzles are all examples of playful ways to practice organizing space. 3. These turtles are amazing to hold in the hand. Can you tell me about the process to create them? I cut them on a laser cutter using 3/16" American hardwood. Each set has some maple and some walnut in order to provide a light/dark contrast that encourages kids to make patterns. Again, I owe a debt to my Normandale colleague Kevin Lee for getting me started using a laser cutter, and for using such nice wood for his artwork. Those original scraps were walnut, and I noticed how nice they felt to touch right away. 4. How would you suggest teachers or parents introduce them to children. Do you have any suggestions for using them in a lesson plan? Let the children play. Four and five year olds sometimes benefit from seeing someone else putting a couple of turtles together. Most older children (and many of the younger ones) will see the potential on their own. Nearly all children are drawn to touch the turtles if you just leave them out in a little pile. Watching children at the State Fair, and then in other venues (including a kindergarten), I notice that as kids play with the turtles they get new ideas, and that these ideas become more complicated over time. This means that a kid who is carefully rotating a turtle to figure out how to fit two of them together is ten minutes later making alternating rows of light and dark turtles, or playing with negative space by leaving turtles out of the design. The main way a parent or teacher can add to the experience is asking gentle questions along the way. Prompts such as "I notice that you're making a pattern. What can you tell me about your pattern?" are helpful in getting children to describe their thinking. The turtles are toys with a deep mathematical structure. Kids notice that structure through their play. There's not really much more needed in order for children to have a productive experience playing with them. 5. Are there more tessellation puzzles on the way? Funny you should mention "puzzle". I don't think of the turtles as a puzzle at all. Puzzles are great fun but they have a predetermined finishing point. You're done once you've filled the frame. Maybe you do the puzzle again, but you end up with the same result. The turtles, by contrast, don't have a specified end. This is sometimes troubling for adults; it rarely is for children. Nearly all children are happy to establish and strive for their own goals, and to have these goals change as they play. I became curious about why so many children at the State Fair were compelled to continue putting more and more turtles together (we had about 200 turtles on a long table). I realized that it's an encounter with infinity. Every time you put in a new turtle, you make room for another one. The process only ends because you run out of turtles—or out of space-- but you can imagine more of each of these. It never ends because you've run out of ideas. Are there more on the way? The short answer is yes. I'm working on a bunch of things. I have become captivated with spiraling polygons. A surprisingly simple pentagon can make a spiral that grows without gaps between the pentagons, covering the plane without the kinds of repetition you see with the turtles and other tessellations. After my friend John Golden got me started with the spiraling pentagons, I wondered what other polygons I could make that work in the same way. It turns out that any number of sides greater than four can make a spiraling polygon of this sort. I have made hexagons, octagons and nonagons using these principles. You may be familiar with Pattern Blocks, which are ubiquitous in American classrooms. I'm working on a new collection of shapes that I'm callling 21st Century Pattern Blocks—a high-design update of the original. These are still in early prototypes, but I've been testing some of the shapes in the set with children in a variety of settings. They're tons of fun, but nothing is quite so approachable as these turtles! How great is this? Thank you, Christopher. You can visit the Kickstarter for Tessalation! here.
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I've been on Kickstarter as a creator for just four days and I've already learned a few things. 1.) This is an amazing community And I'm not just saying that because I'm 49.84% funded (!). It's what I've always wanted to experience -- the marketplace of ideas, if the market is really smart people who want to be at the front end of societal impulses. This is why a nerdy story about tessellations can be a thing, even if some of the initial feedback I got for my book was that it may only be for so-called smart kids. 2.) Kickstarter and other platforms are how society can change. Think of it this way. By the time a cultural product makes it into the mainstream, it's had tens if not hundreds of hands shaping it for maximum exposure. Here's what happens in marketing: You have a Chinese-American child as a protaganist? Let's make it a brown-haired white girl. Or better yet, let's make it a boy, since we believe that boys can't connect with girl protaganists. Kickstarter be like: Screw that! 3.) Kickstarter creates an unprecedented connection between readers and creators. I can't imagine another way, other than perhaps hand-selling books, that I could sell a book and see exactly who is buying it. And let me tell you, seeing the names of people I know and don't know come through is the fuel for my fire! I have seen so many lovely names come through, and there are some surprises in there! That is all! I hope that if you've thought about pledging to Tessalation! but are a Kickstarter newbie, that you'll consider having my project be your first time! I've been both burned (backed projects never sending rewards) and blessed on Kickstarter. What's your experience?I was so thrilled to find this organization, which supports creating more diversity in books. That's a subject that is very special to my heart. I wrote Tessalation! with an Asian-American character because I wanted my niece, Piper, who is Chinese-American, to always have a book that looked like her. I'm dedicating Tessalation! to her. Just how important is this to me? When my sister had her first son, I looked around for some books to get him. Sadly, none of them looked like him. So I took one of my favorite books, "I Love You Through and Through," and I used a black Sharpie to color in his hair. All 32 pages. But as a white author with an Asian character, I know I have a lot to do to ensure that the presentation of this story comes off right. That's why I'll be betatesting my book with families off all stripe before it goes to the printer. About We Need Diverse Books: We Need Diverse Books™ is a grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people. Does your child need books that look like them?
Today I launched Tessa into the world in a very big way! My children's book project is now LIVE ON KICKSTARTER! This has been several-months-in-the-making and I couldn't be prouder! I am spending this first launch day doing the following things:
Are you ready to become a piece of the Tessalation puzzle? Click here!This might be the best idea I've had. Tessalation! coloring pages! I am working with an excellent Fiverr designer to put together some simple coloring pages from the book for the Kickstarter party I'm having on March 1. If you have kids, you know about coloring pages! So easy and fun to just print something out and whip out the markers! I had my designer make a combination of the tessellation pages and the regular narrative pages so depending on your mood you can color away whatever your speed. I have another goal with these pages, though. I'm making them for the party (and for my color-happy sons), but I also want to have them available to give to bloggers, especially mommy blogs, who are looking for activities to do with their children. So when the Kickstarter goes live I'll send the coloring pages with the information about the Kickstarter campaign! It's always good to offer people something, don't you think? I'd recommend coloring pages to anyone who's considering doing a Kickstarter for a kids' book. Who knows -- maybe the campaign will really get rolling and I'll have to make a whole Tessalation! coloring book! Thanks for checking in with Tessa! Share these with your favorite little artist!Last Friday I did something that felt very brave to me, and also a little crazy. I put out a blog post about how hard it was to develop my Kickstarter rewards for my forthcoming campaign for Tessalation! and asked my friends to comment on it before it goes live on March 1, World Math Day. In retrospect, this wasn't scary at all. It was the smartest thing I've done. Doing so, I gave the very people who had encouraged me to do Kickstarter in the first place a chance to help me shape my campaign to fit their needs before I launched it. People like: Frequent Kickstarter backers, prospective book buyers, an independent bookseller, fans and momsHere are some of the things I learned from the Facebook conversation we had. 1. The price point for a children's book launched on Kickstarter should be about $25 People will spend about $20 on a hardback children's picture book, and will willingly support a friend's Kickstarter to be a part of that campaign and feel like part of its story. Anything more and it feels like the price isn't aligned with the true value of the product. 2. Prospective buyers do not want to donate to charity. I had planned to have an option to donate to the organization Pretty Brainy, which supports math and science interest among young girls, but most of the people I interact with thought this wouldn't get a lot of interest, that the product is the most important part of the campaign. That's good news, since Pretty Brainy has never responded to my inquiries! 3. Supporters want a variety of rewards at a variety of price points. It's easy to go completely overboard with ideas of how to make branded products around the Kickstarter campaign -- Tessa plushy doll, anyone? -- but the ones that gained the most interest in our conversation were a custom puzzle (fitting with being a piece of the Tessalation! puzzle) and a giclee print from the book. 4. Incentivizing multiple books received is a great idea. My Facebook fans felt that asking a parent to donate a book to the library was too much of an ask, but giving them an option to order two books for a smaller price tag was an attractive option. So I'm changing that particular reward to allow Kickstarter campaign participants to have a book for themselves and for a friend for $45, which is an effective discount. 5. Friends like to feel like a part of the project My friends, especially the ones who are frequent Kickstarter backers, have been uber-supportive of Tessalation! and its potential campaign. They are the ones who convinced me to do Kickstarter in the first place and they are the ones who helped me fine-tune the rewards. I respect and value their opinions above all else! Some of them have even done their own campaigns and were able to clue me in on little details I might have missed. One suggestion was to be very careful what I promise at the "Angel" level, the highest level. Otherwise, I might end up doing a school visit in Australia! Come to think of it, that doesn't sound half bad... Have you tested your Kickstarter rewards before launching? What did you discover?
By far the hardest thing I've done for this Kickstarter campaign is to work on the pledge levels. Who wants what? How do I anticipate how many people want the book and how will I accommodate the ones who have already said they do? Here's what I've come up with for the Tessalation! Kickstarter pledge levels. Tessalation! Pledge levels: $5 Turtle (Our thanks, 25 available)
$10 Bee (Digital Bundle) + postcard (100 available)
$15 Koi (Digital Bundle) PDF + postcard + stickers! (100 available)
$25 Tessalation! Hardback! (Limited Edition Hardback + Digital PDF + Postcard + Name on Website) (300 available)
$50 Mushroom (100 available) Digital + Signed Hard Copy + Postcard + Donation in your name to Pretty Brainy
$50 Tessa in the Library! (50 available) Digital PDF + 2 Hard Copies + Postcard
$100 Butterfly (10 available) Digital PDF + Hard Copy + Postcard + Tessalation! puzzle
$500 Tessa in your school! (Oregon Schools only, 4 available) Digital + 3 Hard Copies + Digital Copy + Postcard + Stickers! + author Emily Grosvenor will visit your school and lead a class on how to make a tessellation
What do you think? Do I need to offer some other packages in there to accommodate what people want?After much thought, late-night nail-biting, early-morning fretting, mid-day obsessing and weeks of himming and hawing, I'm doing it. I'm launching a Kickstarter campaign for Tessalation! on World Math Day, March 1, 2016! This is a project that started out with modest intentions (as so many do). I was going to hire someone to do some illustrations, slap some text on that baby and publish on Kindle, you know, just wait for the money to flow in. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Let's call this the Bathsheba version of bringing a book into the world. A lot has happened between then and now. For one, I got some early support from friends and family who were pre-ordering the book BEFORE IT EVEN EXISTED! And they didn't just want a digital book. They wanted a real, flesh-and-bones, go-to-bed-with-you book to love and keep. Let's just say that the stakes rose very quickly for me, and I am glad for it. So what does this mean for me in the next couple of weeks? Well, after talking to some great Kickstarter creators who have successfully brought their projects to fruition, I am making my plan for a Kickstarter launch on March 1. Why March 1? Well, I gave myself a deadline, which has forced me to focus. It was inspired by Jessica Abel's amazing recent blog post about focusing on The One Thing that will help you get your work out in the world. I'm a journalist at my core and I *heart* deadlines, so I picked: WORLD MATH DAY! I'm going to be putting Tessalation! out there in a big way over the next couple of weeks, and I'm going to be overcoming the really, really uncomfortable action of the ASK. Asking for social shares, asking for support, asking for someone to drop off some chocolate to get me through this. I am so very thankful for everyone who has supported Tessalation! up until now, and I look forward to writing updates and making some amazing extras and rewards for every level of the campaign. The biggest ask will be for launch day. The stats show that if you can fund your project at 20% on the first day, your chances of succeeding are greater. am going to be asking you to support the project in any way you can, either by committing to one of the levels or by sharing the campaign (or both!). Rest assured, I am thankful for any help I can get, and no amount of help is too small. Thank you for staying tuned and for your support!
Since I reached out to 10 Kickstarter creators, I have heard back from the vast majority of them. I got a chance to chat by phone yesterday with William Heimbach, the author of The Whale Who Dreamt of a Snail. It is a testament to Kickstarter's community-drive nature that he took 45 minutes! out of his Tuesday morning to chat with me about lessons learned and ideas for launching my own Kickstarter. How amazing is that! William was full of helpful information, and I'll share it here in bullet-point form, even if that means I won't be able to recreate his voice on the page. In other words, this is paraphrased :)
Also, it was heartening to hear from William about how doing the Kickstarter actually helped him launch his web-design consultancy, My Digital Land. William and his wife now work full-time at home with their kiddos on their business! To me, that's something you can't learn by just looking at the pages from successful Kickstarters. It's a multiplying effect thing -- putting yourself out there in a big way and not having any idea where the success where take you! Thank you, William! I also reached out to the creators of You're Doing Great, Baby! I love this book, and it has success written all over it from the get-go because it has messaging inside for both parent and child. I wish it had been around when I had babies! Here's what creator Beth Taylor told me: Dear Emily Thanks so much for your kind words about our book. It is a real honour to be included in your list. Your project sounds great and it's fantastic that you're reaching out to ask questions. Looks like you've had some good advice already. Stuff to do before launch included finishing the book itself so that it was ready to go to the printer, producing the description, video and graphics, and finalising our reward levels and funding goal (we spent SO long on the rewards and funding goal - good to have one or two people outside of the project you really trust to help with this). I also had a lot of blog posts in various states of draft so that I'd have blog posts to publish during the campaign when we were busy with other stuff. My advice for writing your description and doing your video is to write them so that your personality shines through - it will differentiate yours from all the others. Whether you use humour or it's a bit quirky - personality is so important when there's a tonne of stuff out there. Having a spreadsheet with every detail possible (printing costs, reward costs, postage costs to a range of places and costs of packaging material etc.) really helps you decide what your funding goal should be and helps you track your progress. Another thing I did before the launch of the campaign was to draft emails to everyone I knew who could possibly be interested. The emails, which I sent out on day one of the campaign, were personal (not to a group) and invited them to check out the project and share it with others. I found that for each person who shared the project on Facebook we would get about one of their friends backing us. It really helps if people sharing the project say something about why they think it's important/why they love it. It's good to have a timeline ready that you can add to/change. I gave each week a major theme so that the blog posts I published would have a theme and then also included a post per week about something to do with the process of writing or illustrating it. During the campaign I'd say I spent 3-4 hours per day and my husband would have spent 1-2 hrs per day inc. replying to messages from backers, writing blog posts, producing and posting pics to social media, publicising campaign on different Facebook group pages etc. I found the free graphic design website Canva.com incredibly useful for graphics. I don't think that Instagram and Twitter brought in many new people, but it was useful to have a presence on there as well as on Facebook. I found our Facebook page the most helpful. We did the Kickstarter in August 2015 and we are still working on some of the rewards in February 2016! We allowed a lot of time in the deadline for people but we are still working on the last of the custom artworks and I haven't done all the consultations with people yet. People always say to be careful how involved your rewards are and to avoid postage as much as possible and I'm sure it's true - but we also wanted to feel like we were offering the best value for money for people and so we included some more labour intensive rewards anyway. You've got to do what feels right for you. It's not an easy way to make money by any means, but it's the best way we found to get our work out there and find a community of people interested in our project. Hopefully if we do another book we will have lots of people already interested and on our mailing list. Things we maybe should have done differently would be to put more time into getting the project into other people's blogs and online publications. We only had one (online) newspaper article and two blog posts written about us and it would have been great if there was more. If there's any longer lead-in stuff you can do (line-up a magazine article or guest blog posts or an appearance on a podcast/radio/TV show) before launching that would be a good idea because four weeks goes by really fast! Wishing you all the best with your campaign! Looks like you've got all the ingredients! People can buy copies of our book here: http://www.doinggreatbaby.com/shop/ Best wishes, Beth & Jeff Thank you, Beth and Jeff! Can you tell I'm falling in love with Kickstarter? I already see my memoir now. Kickstart My Heart: A Love Story :) I'm launching the Tessalation! Kickstarter on March 1, World Math Day! Wish me luck!
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AuthorEmily Grosvenor, author of Tessalation!, a children's book about tesselations and patterns in nature. Archives
October 2022
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