Race track

A race anything can be the fuel for

A track with laps on it is the oldest motivation device there is, and it works because it answers two questions at once: how far have I got, and who is ahead of me. Roll the die and it is a board game. Ignore the die and it is a chart: a space for every page read, every length swum, every set of ten sums finished, every day somebody remembered their kit. Because the buttons move any car by one or five at a time, the rule for earning a space is entirely yours and the screen never needs to know it.

A classroom reading race is the version this gets used for most. Twenty spaces to a lap and three laps is sixty spaces, which is a term at a chapter a night, and the oval is the part that makes it work: the cars stay close together on screen instead of stretching into a line where the child at the back can see exactly how far back they are.

Why a dead heat stays a dead heat

Two cars can reach the finish on the same distance, and when they do the banner says photo finish and names both. It would be easy to break the tie on roster order or on who moved last, and it would also be a decision the screen has no business making. The same rule runs the whole way down the field: level cars share a place and the next place is skipped, so four players with two of them level read first, second, second, fourth.

Everything the tool says out loud follows the same principle. The live announcement names the lap, the space and the roll, so somebody who cannot see the oval still knows where they are, and the finish is announced as words rather than left to a colour on a chequered band.

Race track or progress track

The progress track is a path from a start to an end, with labelled spaces that do something when you land on them. This one is a loop with no labels at all and a lap counter instead, so it suits a long run at the same thing rather than a journey with events along the way. Pick the progress track when landing somewhere should matter, and the race track when the only thing that matters is distance.

For points rather than positions, the scoreboard is the faster page, and for a countdown to run the race against, the countdown timer reads from across a room. Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses, and they stay in this browser.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.race.state, pph.race.rules and pph.race.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.