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SparkFun will be closed on Tuesday, November 5th to support our team in being able to go out and vote! Orders placed after 2 pm MT Monday, November 4th will ship on Wednesday, November 6th. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Hey folks! Today we are excited to announce a new contest we're hosting. The contest is entirely online, at your own pace, and you can earn discounts off SparkFun gear! It's called the SparkFun Faire Game!
Here is how it will work:
- Below you will find a list of challenges you can complete at home over the next week (12:01 a.m. MT on September 14th - 11:59 p.m. MT September 21, 2014)
- When you've completed a challenge, simply tweet @sparkfun with a photo or video of your project, which challenge it fulfulls (the "color" of the challenge) and the hashtag "#myfairegame." We will be using this hashtag to tally your complete challenges SO DON"T FORGET! For example you would tweet "Hey @sparkfun - I just completed the red challenge! #myfairegame - [attached picture]." You will need a Twitter account to participate in this competition - but it only takes a few minutes to set one up!
- Once the competition has ended, we will tally the results and send you a discount code based on how many challenges you completed. Complete all 10 challenges = 25% off, 5-9 challenges = 20% off, 1-4 challenges = 10% off.
- Lastly, you must register using the EventBrite form below. It's completely free and this will give us a way to contact you after the competition has ended so we can get you your prize!
Navy Blue -- RoboGames: Play a game. With a robot. Tweet This!
Sky Blue -- Wide World of Science: Do a science experiment at home. Tweet This!
Red -- Build Something Beautiful. Tweet This!
Yellow -- Coding is Love: Learn how to do something with code. Program an Arudino, build a website, make a Javascript game--up to you! Tweet This!
Forest Green -- Agrihack for Justice!: Learn about farm hacking and Smart Citizen Tweet This!
Lime Green -- Craft your heart out: Make a gift for someone. Tweet This!
Purple -- You can build it: Visit your local hackerspace, makerspace, or hacker/maker meetup. If none of those exist, start a meetup yourself! Tweet This!
White -- Pssh Doors: Learn how to lockpick. Tweet This!
Orange -- Share the geekery: Do something geeky with someone who’s never done it before. Tweet This!
Pink -- Tinker, tailor, solder, spy: Solder something! Tweet This!
We hope you enjoy the SparkFun Faire Game - and maybe learn an awesome new skill while you're at it!
Somehow, I knew before reading comments that people would complain about the use of Twitter..
Seriously folks, if you want the 10-25% discount, take 2 minutes, create a profile, use it for the week, then gasp don't use it again. I created an account years ago so I could keep family up-to-date while traveling long distances. I've rarely used it since, but it's useful in situations like this. It takes more effort to gripe than to use it.
Too bad for us that don't tweet.
We did consider that, but Twitter made the most sense for compiling all the responses. There are tools out there that let us easily gather all the responses, organize them and group them. It also makes it easy for other people to search for the hashtag (#myfairegame) and see what other people are doing and get ideas and be inspired.
If you want to participate, creating a Twitter account is fast and easy. But we also understand if you eschew social media - we'll be doing more contests like this in the future and will look to diversify the means of entry.
I used to feel the same way, especially about Facebook contests, but I have since given up on it. I think promoting their product through social media is perfectly reasonable, and the advertising this creates makes good sense. I don't plan to participate, but I know its my choice, so no hard feelings against SF.
+1... loss of valuable resources due to an inane fad.
8 years is a hell of a fad..
I just wanted to chime in and say that I will not be participating because of the use of twitter (I'm probably in the minority). I know that signing up for twitter is easy and takes 2 minutes, but I really don't like twitter and do not want to support twitter. I do want to say that this is not really a complaint about the contest, but more of a FYI. Twitter makes sense for what you are trying to do and you are totally free to use whatever outlet you deem necessary. I really hope that the challenge is extremely successful.
Last time I gave my email out to Eventbrite... Well my spam box still hasn't recovered, going on 3 years
No thanks you. Sorry SparkFun you lost me. Don’t use Twitter and don’t want more spam from Eventbrite. For What?? All for the privilege of winning a discount to give you money!
What a cool contest--then I saw the twitter requirement, yuck. How about just having a comment place just like this--or would it get too big? I have no idea how many would participate or how hard that would be to do, but then it would be easy to find (on Sparkfun rather than twitter) and one less account to be hacked.
We did consider that not everyone is on Twitter, but as Emcee Grady said above, it was the tool that made the most sense for us to run this contest. If we did it just in the blog comments, there's no easy way like a hashtag to export and track all that data--and remember, a real human being has to sit down and tally the responses at the end of the game. We love you guys and definitely want you to be able to participate, so in the future we'll see if we can find multiple methods of entry.
So what's going on? After I replied to the email requesting my Twitter handle, I completed five challenges, tweeted them all to @Sparkfun before the deadline, but haven't heard anything yet. Still tallying?
Still tallying! There are a lot of handles/emails/challenges completed to sync up. We'll be in touch before the end of the week for sure with your discount code.
Hey, Emcee Grady, I am in a situation similar to MrAureliusR. I have not heard anything, and am wondering if the discount codes have been sent. I haven't heard from you guys and completed 6 challenges... Any news? Thanks.
What's your twitter handle? I can look into it. Sorry about that!
lotavio69, same as my sparkfun alias. Thanks!
Ah yes - we found a slight flaw in the system. If your tweets are protected, we can't see them and can't tally. Thanks for letting us know - I'll be contacting you via email to sort it out.
Just finished up the challenges, had fun time doing it. Thanks for doing this and hope theres more similar in the future.
how old do you have to be for this
Is it kosher for some of the activities to be done by different members of my family and still get counted on the same entry? My wife and I want to participate in this with our kids, and plan on doing the activities together, but the person actually soldering/making/knitting/whatever each thing may be different. [edit] Whoops, I failed to read a similar question from a few days ago. I'll leave this one up just to clarify whether it is OK that a different member of the family may be the primary person doing different activities.
Totally fine!
Lots of hate about twitter. I don't use it but I have an account in case someone decides to make a silly contest using twitter :)
My main thought.... I like this, but give us more time. Maybe a month would be too long. How about 2 weeks next time?
Is it ok if I include my kids (ages 9 & 6) with me in the projects and photos? Thanks for the contest - I think it'll be a fun week!
Yes! And we are so glad that you are including them. Enjoy! And let us know how it goes!
After contest ends how long will the discount code be valid for? And will it be valid for anything in the store or will there be exclusions?
No exclusions. Not sure on the duration, but we'll give you plenty of time to get orders in.
I used to think Twitter was a fad too, but now I really like it. It's fun to hook Xbee's to it ;-) I still can't stand Facebook though...maybe Sparkfun can invent a cool use for it someday.
How are you going to be able to link our eventbrite registration to our twitter account. I don't recall seeing a spot to put my twitter name.
Great question and one that slipped our minds. We've added that question to the eventbrite registration now. We're going to send out an email shortly to folks who have already registered to request their handle. Thank you (very much) for bringing that to our attention!