Best way to vote for yearbook superlatives

March 5, 2020 9:58 AM

What is the best tool for my kids' tiny 8th grade class to vote on their yearbook superlatives?

Can you help me find the best software solution for 13 kids to vote on yearbook superlatives? SurveyMonkey? Doodlepoll? Something else? I have experience with SurveyMonkey (and a paid account) but a voting matrix like this (13 names to 13-15 categories with long names) looks pretty clunky in their format. So I'm just wondering if there are any other solutions out there that would work better?

Background: my kids attend a fairly small public magnet school. 3 years ago, what was previously just an elementary school became a K-8 and my twin girls are now in the inaugural 8th grade class. The class is small - only 13 kids - and very tight-knit, and the parents are pretty engaged. Since this is the first year that we have a full middle school component - 6th, 7th and 8th grade classes - we have a lot of freedom in choosing new events and traditions for the middle school. I volunteered to help with the middle school yearbook.

One of the things we're doing for the first time this year is yearbook superlatives for the graduating 8th graders. You know, 'most athletic', 'most likely to become president' - that kind of stuff. (We're doing it with a twist: first, no 'negative' attributes like 'biggest mooch' etc OR things like 'most popular', and second, each of the 13 kids will win a category.) The students are all on board with this and excited, and have had say in what the categories will be.

So I'm looking for the best software/tool to do the following: allow the 13 kids to assign their classmates' names to one of about 15 categories. They have to choose a category for each of their classmates; they can't leave any out. I will send the teacher the link, who will share it with the class and have them all vote. But a matrix of 13 x 15 or so, with long category names, looks clunky in SurveyMonkey, which is what I would normally use. What tool would you suggest? Old-school paper/ballot boxes will not work because of Reasons.

My 8th graders thank you : )

posted by widdershins to Technology (5 answers total)

Make a form, I suppose Google Sheets or Docs would work, with each student's name and a field. Everybody goes down the list independently and enters a freeform adjective they would apply to that person. Collate all of these and assign the categories on a ranked-choice principle. I guess my question here would be how important the voting part would be if there was a survey that was doing most of the work.
posted by rhizome at 10:29 AM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Note that using your methodology, a couple kids might not win in any of the categories even if everyone is forced to include everyone, and that might feel crappy to them. I suggest having everyone choose a positive adjective for each person like rhizome said; since there aren't many kids, it won't be hard to read them all to find a common theme per person, and the results will be more personalized.

If you're committed to your plan, you could set up each page of the survey as one person's name and they would select a category for them from the whole list. This can be programmed to remove categories as they're used, but keeping them all in could be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
posted by metasarah at 12:02 PM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

with SM you wouldn't need a 13x15 matrix, you could do a drop down matrix. so the left column is all the awards and the right column each row has a dropdown of each kid's name.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 1:08 PM on March 5, 2020

Won't kids get pigeonholed this way? By the time you get down to the 13th classmate, there are only two things left that you can select as being their thing. What happens when you're picking that last classmate and neither remaining option matches them. Maybe have even more superlatives to choose from.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:50 PM on March 5, 2020

My thought was that if everybody's filling it out separately that you might wind up with a bucket of 20+ adjectives that can then be ranked-choice down to good ones for each kid. This wouldn't work out if teacher supplied exactly 13 options to be apportioned, just let the kids enter whatever they want for the teacher to winnow into the end result.
posted by rhizome at 4:42 PM on March 5, 2020