Intelligent Textbook Mascots¶
This git repository contains a database of reusable mascot characters used across intelligent textbook projects. This repository is designed to be used with an AI Skill to help you select an existing mascot design to match to your textbook or to quickly create variations of existing designs using a token-efficient process. This process can be done even if you do not have an API key to an image generation LLM. This process enlarges the number of users (teachers) that can use textbook generators that include mascots in their books without the need for "expensive" image generation tools. It also has skills that can generate new mascots using a high-quality image prompts. In this case "expensive" would be around $3 USD per textbook for using an image generation API. This adds up when teachers need to generate many textbooks.
Mascot Image Structure¶
The intelligent textbooks skill libraries use mascot images placed in the directory `PROJECT/img/mascot'
Each mascot has a set of at least seven poses:
- neutral.png
- welcome.png
- tip.png
- thinking.png
- encouraging.png
- warning.png
- celebration.png
All images MUST be PNG files with transparent backgrounds (alpha channel).
We provide installation scripts to install the mascot images. There is a linux version that runs on any Mac, Linux, or Windows System for Linus (WSL) or Windows PowerShell version that runs on some Windows systems. You must have permissions to run these installation scripts.
Integrations with Intelligent Book Skills¶
Our chapter content generator skill looks for a document called a "character-sheet.md" that will provide guidance on how the mascot can be used to add personality and visual cues throughout a book.
If you do not have a tool that generates images (text to image generator) we encourage you to reuse these mascots for your textbook. They are Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). They are free to use in your classrooms but you cannot resell them for commercial purposes.
Ways to View The Mascots¶
We provide three ways to view the mascots:
- Browse the mascot gallery → - this is just an alphabetical listing of all the mascots.
- Listing by Animal/Robot Name (species directory)
- Similarity Map - 2D map of icons grouped by similarity - note the load times are sometimes longer for this view
Installation Scripts¶
We provide both a Linux Shell and a Windows Powershell(TM) versions
of scripts that install the seven images into the img/mascot directory
of your project. Note that the installation scripts do not generate a
character sheet file. This is done by the intelligent textbook skills.