Tassimals Days of the Week Competition Reveal
Tassomai’s very popular collectable stickers “Tassimals” released a new collection in the autumn designed to drive students to spread their work through the week.
Our Days Of The Week Tassimals were launched with a competition: to collect the full set, and then to identify the connection between them.
Our wonderful designer, Henry Richardson did some exceptional work to come up with a set of attractive images that contained some subtle and clever hidden elements for our competition.
We offered £500 of prizes to those students who could find the connections, and we were amazed by the response. Many answers were wide of the mark but nonetheless brilliantly thoughtful and inventive. Many other students found the answer and submitted it via their teachers.
So now it’s time to reveal the answers and the winners.
Our inspiration for the animals’ selection came from a version of the traditional rhyme, “Monday’s Child”, with Murray picking an animal that he felt represented that idea:
Monday’s Child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s Child is full of grace;
Wednesday’s Child is full of woe,
Thursday’s Child has far to go;
Friday’s Child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s Child works hard for a living;
And the child that is born on the Sabbath Day,
is fair and wise, and good and gay.
For these we picked: orangutan, swan, donkey, swallow, otter, guide-dog and wolf, respectively. The choices are, of course, subjective and some based more on popular mythology or depictions in literature than scientific objective fact, but hey… it’s our game and we make the rules!
We wanted to add another level to the game though, and in large part this was inspired by Murray’s hobby of collecting playing cards and tarot, where many special decks contain hidden symbols or elements.
Murray and Henry played with a few concepts but kept returning to the idea of the classical planets, each of which relates to a day of the week, and each of which has an established symbol used in a wide range of scientific and artistic fields including astronomy, chemistry and astrology.
Monday = Moon,
Tuesday = Mars,
Wednesday = Mercury,
Thursday = Jupiter,
Friday = Venus,
Saturday = Saturn
Sunday = Sun.
Henry had a lot of fun (and some difficulty in certain cases) incorporating these planetary symbols into the illustrations. The Saturn symbol leant itself easily to the guide-dog’s harness and the moon to the orangutan’s banana, Some were tougher: hiding the mars and venus symbols in the swan’s and otter’s body and the reeds and ripples around them, and forming Jupiter within the swallow was a particular challenge.
What surprised us as we watched the guesses come in was that actually more students found the symbols than the Monday’s Child connection: perhaps because it was less subjective.
But within the text describing each sticker as they won them, we did hint at those key words; we suspect most people eventually thought about the swan as graceful and worked back from there….
Anyway, this was a lot of fun for us, and we’ve loved reading the submissions coming from schools all around the country—so a big thank you to all the teachers who sent in submissions, and a huge “well done” to all who collected the stickers and had a go.
Our presentations (attached) are designed for schools to easily access, download and run in assemblies, and within them are revealed our four winners of our cash prizes. Please get in touch to let us know what you thought of our game (and if you have new ideas for Tassimals collections!).