Today is day 10 of Blogger Challenge 2008, in which generous ScienceBlogs readers help public school teachers come up with the funds to deliver the educational goods to their students. As I write this post, challenges mounted by ScienceBloggers have crossed the $10,000 mark.
Given that this money has come from 113 donors and that there are about a bajillion ScienceBlogs readers, I’m guessing there are some folks thinking about making a donation but hanging back from actually donating. My hope is that this post will give you that little push forward you might need.
You’ll recall that I’ve already offered up an array of incentives for donations to my challenge, from poems, to original artwork by the Free-Ride offspring, to temporary tattoos with sprog art, to basic concepts posts written to order, to an after school experiment designed just for you.
Other ScienceBloggers are offering incentives, too.
The top two givers (top one-time donation and most given cumulatively) to the A Blog Around the Clock challenge will get their choice of prizes from Bora’s Cafe Press store or Open Laboratory 2006, 2007, or 2008.
Donors to the DrugMonkey challenge can enter a drawing for DrugMonkey schwag — regardless of the size of the donation.
If you donate in any amount to the ScienceWomen challenge, you can enter the drawing for five T-shirts from Yellow Ibis — and ScienceWoman will kick in 10 cents of her own money for every dollar you contribute.
Donations in various amounts to the Green Gabbro challenge will get you a number of fabulous geology and/or food-related incentives, from pet rock naming rights, to a food geology post (like this one), to a serious science post. Also, the first two donors from the Seattle area will score a jar of homemade apple sauce or apple butter.
For donations of various sizes to the Uncertain Principles challenge, Chad is prepared to answer your reasonable questions, talk with his dog about science (and blog the conversation), or send you the current draft of his book in progress, Bunnies Made of Cheese.
The best reason to give to a challenge, of course, is that your contribution — combined with those of the other folks making contributions — will make a real difference to public school kids. Your five bucks could be the last bit of funding needed to buy safety goggles or dissection tools, counting toys or copy paper, lab notebooks or a field trip that captures kids’ imagination and makes learning as effective and fun as it should be.
But if you’re on the fence, maybe one of these thank-you gifts can get you off it.
If the individual thank-you gift is not your thing, however, maybe we can up the ante.
Details in the next post!
