A Preview of the Quiz
A preview of what Free Day 2011 is going to look like.
With just an hour to go, I'd like to give you a bit of a preview of what Free Day 2011 will look like. As things unfold, feel free to join us in the SparkFun IRC channel.
If you get a moment, please review the goals and rules of FreeDay from the previous post. Free Day is a little different this year. We're going to give the old timers a gimme, and the new comers are going to have to learn a bit.
Here's what SparkFun will look like during Free Day. Checkout the top banner. It will be running and updating throughout the day. Please ignore the $1,000 in the graphic. That is the artificial limit set on our test server. We will be giving away the full $150,000 tomorrow starting at 9AM MST on January 13th, 2011.
Next notice the large red block on the main page area. That's where you click to begin the Free Day 2011 giveaway.
Please click the above image to get a larger view. Now you need to decide. Do you take the instant gift or go into the quiz for potentially less and potentially more money ($0 to $100)? Remember, once you make your decision and click on a box, you cannot change your mind.
I won't even compute the odds of that promo code actually working.
Now let's assume you click on the 'Redeem Loyalty Funds' before Free Day expires. You will immediately be taken to a page where you will see your promo code. Awesome! Congrats!
Now let's see what happens if instead, you click on 'Enter the Quiz'. It's pretty simple. On the left you'll see one of our 20 new Bite Sized Primer tutorials. These are very quick tutorials to give you the basic understanding of a principal piece of knowledge. Basically something you should know when playing in the world of tangible electronic interfaces. On the right you'll be given a question and four potential answers. Please don't worry too much about the difficulty of these questions. They are just challenging enough for a newcomer to have to read the tutorial, but should be straight forward for a technical user.
You click on an answer and click 'Submit Answer' or 'Skip'.
- If you get the question right, you get $10 and we donate $2.
- If you get the question wrong, you lose $3 and a bit of your street cred.
- If you skip a question, you advance to the next question. You will be allowed to return to any unanswered questions.
You can navigate away from the quiz page but we don't recommend it. Credit is given out as you advance through the quiz. The quiz may end on any question when the $150,000 pool is exhausted, but you will keep any credit you've accumulated regardless of whether you've answered all ten questions or just one.
Assuming there are still funds left, if you have unanswered questions at the end of the quiz, you will be given a chance to go back and answer them. Simply click on the arrow icon to take you back to that question.
Once you've answered all ten questions, or chosen to end the quiz with unanswered questions, or if Free Day ends, you will be taken to the final page where you will receive your promotional code which you will be able to use immediately. Enjoy!
Remember: Promo codes issued from Free Day 2011 have a 60-day time limit. We want you to get your stuff some time in the next two months.
See that? We've got more Dino inside.
Disclaimer: You can help to bring us to our knees again. One of the benefits from Free Day 2010 was the massive load test we threw at our servers. It was a very effective, self-inflicted denial of service attack that showed us where the problems were within our system. We’ve been spending the past 11 months upgrading our hardware by orders of magnitude and completely re-writing our website to squeeze out every efficiency available. Will Free Day 2011 bring our servers to their knees again? It most likely will, but it will continue to push us to improve our systems for non-Free Days. In other words, please come join the party on Thursday at 9AM MST, we need your help to punish our server bank.
