The Wire

If you haven’t noticed yet, the Mouse Squad Certification Wins! have changed. First we'll tell you what you need to know, and under the heading tl;dr (further below) you’ll find a few reasons for the redesign.

What you need to know:

The new graphics and titles affect Mouse Squad Certification Wins! (not the Badge). The badge for certification will stay the same, and - DON’T PANIC - members who were registered in the past will see their Wins! carry over with the new graphic and title. We rebranded Wins! to be more awesome, descriptive of the skills you’ve earned, and more awesome. More about the two kinds of awesome:

• awesome #1: some squads don’t complete all 10 Wins! for all kinds of different reasons. But Squad Members who know, for example, Networking and Troubleshooting, should be able to show those skills on their profile. When the Win! was just a number, that was hard to do. Now you can.
• awesome #2: the new Wins! are more fun, and at Mouse we feel that fun goes hand-in-hand with learning new things.

If you read no further, that’s okay. Go earn some more Wins! and leave some comments below to let us know what you think of the new look and feel.

Here's the tl;dr

what’s tl;dr?
A few reasons that the new Wins! are important to us:

• Wins! are a type of credential for the Mouse Community. Credentials (think degrees, certifications, or even belts in Martial Arts) should be things that community members love, want to represent themselves with, and are eager to achieve. At Mouse, we feel pretty strongly that people should love their credentials and, simply put, being a “Network Ninja” seems a lot easier to love than a number “7” that maps to a thing called a module… in a world too packed with stuffy letters and certificates to show your skills, we want your Mouse Wins! to make you laugh, serve as a reminder that getting good at things should be fun, and help you feel powered-up, not left wondering “huh?”
• Sequence is awesome, but not always. Stuff like computer code, life cycles, and complicated recipes benefit a lot from sequence, and for years we’ve been numbering the levels, or modules, for Mouse Squad Certification hoping to benefit the same way. Our goal has always been to suggest the right sequence for tackling certification while offering lots of flexibility to our Coordinators to improvise and do things out-of-order. Now, more than ever, students and educators need flexibility: more controls to design the learning experience that you feel is right for your squad. The Certification Wins! still fall in a logical order that we encourage people to follow if it helps, but for once in your week we hope you’ll use Mouse Squad to hack, move things around, and not be constrained by sequence. Improvisation is good.
• Even small (we sometimes call them micro) credentials should describe what they’re about. First and foremost, people should know what they’re working to achieve, and so in defining the new Wins! we worked hard to make them fun, but descriptive too, so that anyone will have a clear sense of the category of expertise that it represents.

We hope you love them. Leave us comments in the post or, as always, email [email protected] if you spot any bugs.