The Calvin Project

Welcome and thank you for joining the Society for Undoing Serious Ills in Education (SUSIE). As you surely know, we are dedicated to salvaging the educational experiences of remarkable but troubled kids across the planet. Currently, one of our field agents has been tracking the experience of a boy named Calvin. Calvin is nothing less than a child prodigy. His imagination and creative insight are off the charts. Based on his ability to created a whole imaginary world centered around his stuffed tiger Hobbes, we believe he could be the next Tolkein or Lucus. Or, based on his snow creations, he could be the next Picasso. However, based on his school experience thus far, it is exceedingly more likely that he will be the next unreliable worker at a fast food joint. THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN!

The big problem is motivation. All kids have some motivation problems and some kids have all the motivational problems. Calvin is definitely one of the latter! We hear that you are developing experts in this area so that's why we're assigning you to the case. We're counting on you! The development of one of our nation's great minds is at stake! Don't let us down!

To get you started, we archived the footage of Calvin's educational life captured by our undercover agent. To preserve the anonymity of Calvin's identity, the footage was run through our Cartoon-Convertatron. Thus, all footage appears as cartoons you might see in the Sunday paper. Just click on the link below to access this footage. [Note: due to a security leak, much of this footage was posted in newspapers for a number of years.]

Archive of Calvin's Educational Experience

Your Mission

Because of Calvin's extensive problems, we are assigning multiple teams to the case. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to research a given motivation theory and use it to understand the nature of Calvin's problems and develop solutions.