The requirements seem partially too high and the third rule is simply silly. Why is strength so much more unimportant than memorising 250 words? 250 words is too much. Strength is very well defined in your link as “minimum strength required to live a comfortable life”. Endurance seems a bit high and what is defined as “running”? It would be better to define a certain time to complete a certain distance to be more precise. 1 mile seems a bit much though. Finance is a bit too high. Creativity is way too much, start by writing limericks or haikus or something similarily small. These are merely my opinions.
Overall your approach seems to suffer from the problem that a designer needs to know everything about every subject to properly define levels and still cannot account for individual differences in talent or experience. I therefore suggest here again an approach similar to a learning tree as seen at Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard . It can in effect emulate the behavior of a leveling system but is much more flexible and more importantly the task of cataloging all human knowledge and skills can be split up so that experts in the respective fields can design the learning branches for their fields. “Levels” then can be rewardet for completing certain tasks on those branches but “sublevels” for different fields of knowledge can be awarded too.
There are legitimate reasons for not doing intense physical activity—for instance, disability or medical problems. If it is not medically safe for you to run or lift, you shouldn’t be doing it.
I see your point, but that is not what I was going at. Disabilities can render you unable to do anything particular. It just does not seem right to make certain requirements optional as that renders them practically meaningless. Then it is better to abandon those requirements altogether since then the comparability of two “level 1” people is given, but in the case of optional requirements is not.
I was an asthmatic who often hiked but never jogged. I got an inhaler and did a 16 minute mile my first try, and a 12 minute mile my second try. I was jogging, not running, and the Level 1 Requirements are rather unclear on whether that qualifies, but I’d expect that most people really can do a mile. They’re shorter than you’d expect (10-20 blocks in most cities, although it varies :))
Hiking promotes endurance so it is not surprising that you could run 16 miles at first try since the asthma disables you lungs but not your muscles. Though we would have to define what is “running” by giving a velocity so we could be more precise.
Thank you for clarifying. English is not my mother’s tongue. In that case I think we have to know what “running” is so we can talk about how much that is or is not. Though I am not really interested in such details.
Why is strength so much more unimportant than memorizing 250 words?
It’s not more unimportant. The third rule was added because several people felt that the physical requirements were excessive enough to discourage them from leveling entirely, and I didn’t feel comfortable scaling them back to something like “walk 30 minutes without stopping”.
That does not seem right. If you, arbitrarily, decide that some skills are optional, others not, you devalue those that are optional. The whole point of the leveling system is to encourage people to fill their gaps, in this case physical, handicaps aside. And the first thing of a journey of 1000 miles is the first step: Make the L1 requirement for sports easier, though “strength” is pretty easy already.
It would be maybe better to know how many levels you plan to make. If it is, say, 100, it may be better to start with the smallest step possible. If it is 10, then you are right in setting the requirements higher.
This, then, is only a fault of your metric. If you want to measure endurance you can use different means of measurement as suggested in the other child post. Especially in the case of inability to walk you can measure endurance with a wheelchair. Running is just one of many options to measure endurance.
This is plausibly related to a coordination disability, though. I do okay at other measures of endurance that don’t require coordination. My suggested solution is to have either multiple options at each level (run one mile or walk three miles without stopping) or use different exercises for the different benchmarks (run 1 mile for level 1, walk 10 miles for level 2) .
The requirements seem partially too high and the third rule is simply silly. Why is strength so much more unimportant than memorising 250 words? 250 words is too much. Strength is very well defined in your link as “minimum strength required to live a comfortable life”. Endurance seems a bit high and what is defined as “running”? It would be better to define a certain time to complete a certain distance to be more precise. 1 mile seems a bit much though. Finance is a bit too high. Creativity is way too much, start by writing limericks or haikus or something similarily small. These are merely my opinions.
Overall your approach seems to suffer from the problem that a designer needs to know everything about every subject to properly define levels and still cannot account for individual differences in talent or experience. I therefore suggest here again an approach similar to a learning tree as seen at Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard . It can in effect emulate the behavior of a leveling system but is much more flexible and more importantly the task of cataloging all human knowledge and skills can be split up so that experts in the respective fields can design the learning branches for their fields. “Levels” then can be rewardet for completing certain tasks on those branches but “sublevels” for different fields of knowledge can be awarded too.
There are legitimate reasons for not doing intense physical activity—for instance, disability or medical problems. If it is not medically safe for you to run or lift, you shouldn’t be doing it.
I see your point, but that is not what I was going at. Disabilities can render you unable to do anything particular. It just does not seem right to make certain requirements optional as that renders them practically meaningless. Then it is better to abandon those requirements altogether since then the comparability of two “level 1” people is given, but in the case of optional requirements is not.
I was an asthmatic who often hiked but never jogged. I got an inhaler and did a 16 minute mile my first try, and a 12 minute mile my second try. I was jogging, not running, and the Level 1 Requirements are rather unclear on whether that qualifies, but I’d expect that most people really can do a mile. They’re shorter than you’d expect (10-20 blocks in most cities, although it varies :))
Hiking promotes endurance so it is not surprising that you could run 16 miles at first try since the asthma disables you lungs but not your muscles. Though we would have to define what is “running” by giving a velocity so we could be more precise.
One mile in 16 minutes, not 16 miles.
Thank you for clarifying. English is not my mother’s tongue. In that case I think we have to know what “running” is so we can talk about how much that is or is not. Though I am not really interested in such details.
Yes, jogging qualifies.
It’s not more unimportant. The third rule was added because several people felt that the physical requirements were excessive enough to discourage them from leveling entirely, and I didn’t feel comfortable scaling them back to something like “walk 30 minutes without stopping”.
That does not seem right. If you, arbitrarily, decide that some skills are optional, others not, you devalue those that are optional. The whole point of the leveling system is to encourage people to fill their gaps, in this case physical, handicaps aside. And the first thing of a journey of 1000 miles is the first step: Make the L1 requirement for sports easier, though “strength” is pretty easy already.
It would be maybe better to know how many levels you plan to make. If it is, say, 100, it may be better to start with the smallest step possible. If it is 10, then you are right in setting the requirements higher.
One of the persons interested in leveling cannot run at all.
This, then, is only a fault of your metric. If you want to measure endurance you can use different means of measurement as suggested in the other child post. Especially in the case of inability to walk you can measure endurance with a wheelchair. Running is just one of many options to measure endurance.
This is plausibly related to a coordination disability, though. I do okay at other measures of endurance that don’t require coordination. My suggested solution is to have either multiple options at each level (run one mile or walk three miles without stopping) or use different exercises for the different benchmarks (run 1 mile for level 1, walk 10 miles for level 2) .