Note: This idea orginally came from my son. I took his idea and wrote some notes and placed them all in a stack called "Awesome Tickets". Below are the notes and the complete stack is included in disk three. Actually, it is the basis for some simple desktop publishing.
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Awesome Tickets - A Simple Project Idea
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( or design tool) using the flexibility of HyperCard's "Print Stack" command.
HyperCard allows you to print stacks at full, half, third, or quarter size. If a stack made of standard size cards, is printed at half size, the result is two cards printed per page. If standard size cards are printed at half size, the result is eight cards per page. Printing at third size results in 18 and quarter size in 32 cards per page (or maybe a few more with a little finagling.).
We've used that feature in several elementary language arts projects. Basically, stacks and standard size cards provide a good design size. Create what you want then print or shrink (via selecting "half", "third", or "quarter" size ) and print it.
Printing Books
Printing a stack of standard sized cards at full size results in a nice half page size for books (whole language writing and publishing projects.). Students can illustrate the books using HyperCard if you've enough time and computers. Or space can be left for hand drawn illustrations once the stack is printed and copied for each child. Of you can illustrate the book yourself or have your students help you select the illustrations. Whatever ....when the book is complete, print it and make a copy for each child.
Awesome Tickets
My fourth grade son designed the "Awesome Tickets" (seven of the eight following cards) as he called them with a little help from me. These were used in his class to award extra computer time for good work. A couple of points to remember........
1. We printed these at half size, which gave us 8 approximately business size cards per page. They needed to be trimmed and some paper was wasted, but they looked great, especially when printed with a laser printer, on colored paper.
2. Words were written with 18pt font which was still legible when shrunk to "half" size. Size of font may require some experimentation and the number of words you can include will definitely be limited.
3. To waste the least amount of paper, have the same number of cards in your stack as can be printed on a page. If you want to print one of the Garfield cards at "half" size. Copy it eight times in a stack, or have eight different designs in your stack. If you print it at "third" size, have eighteen cards in your stack and so on.
4. Design one card first and copy it as many times as you need to for your particular project.
5. You are welcome to use the simple designs in this stack with your own words or whatever. Simply copy one of the cards to a new stack, (delete the blank card created when you make the new stack), make your changes and duplicate it as many times as you need.
6. When working with these cards, leave out the navigational buttons (you will note that I don't have any in this stack) because they don't look good when printing. Just use your "go" menu command key combinations. For example, press "command 3" to go forward one card and "command 2" to go backward one card.
Other Uses
We've used the "third" size to print tickets for special events (limited quanitites), half size to print business card size cards with riddles, jokes, affirmations and so on them. I'm currently collecting enough different business cards to show my students, then we'll design our own.
I've not tried it yet, but I think this method could be used to print flashcards for specific purposes, special sized books and other things.
Variation On the Theme
As you may or may not know, newer versions of HyperCard (2.0 and up, I think) allow you to vary the size of the cards you create. If you select the "New Stack" command in the file menu you will be taken to a dialog box. In that illustration, the cursor arrow is pointing at a box which says "Standard 9" which is the size stacks are usually made. If you click and hold, you'll see six other card sizes including custom. If some of them are grayed out, you've not allocated enough memory to HyperCard to make those choices possible.
I've not experimented with these various sizes much, but the "MacPaint" choice, which creates a card the size of a standard size "MacPaint" page, makes great quarter page size books when printed in "half" size . Obviously, the number of words you can get on a page is limited.
Some Limitations
Most of these projects, especially the book publishing ones, work best in elementary school, and some in early elementary.
If you do one of the projects which involve shrinking the page, the number of words is obviously limited.
And yes, there are more flexible design packages which can probably do the same thing , maybe even better. I've worked with Publish It Easy and Pagemaker and find that they are so complicated with so many possiblities that otherwise simple jobs can become quite complicated and time consuming.
HyperCard makes designing and illustrating these simple projects faster and more flexible.
I'd love to see examples of your projects using this stack or stacks you've developed. To share, comment or for more information about SchoolHouse Mac (a non-profit, teachers user group) please email me at AOL (Charlie 938) or slomail me at the accress below.
Charles Doe
SchoolHouse Mac
5236 Coats Grove Rd.
Hastings, MI 49058
Note: If you wish to modify the tickets in the stack "Awesome Tickets", you can get the menu bar by pressing "Command" + "Space Bar". I include this here because I recieved some email about it.
