How I did it was just thanks to flow: I just got into the rhythm of creating content the way I always have. It’s a no-nonsense simple linear process I realized that helped dumb-ass me to always create consistent content. I started with the Why. Why am I making this book?
As mentioned in the last post, I started it solely because I felt irked that the content they were consuming was predominantly meant for US/western kids and felt I wanted to bring some native touch to it. But then I was clear that I shouldn’t muddle my need for providing something in their mother tongue to trump the real why? Making something the kids would like to read/use.
So redefined the why: Make a book that the kids can use along with their parents.
Now, the what: This again brought me back to the game we played. So, I decided to make a book that emulates the game we played of giving clues about a vegetable or a fruit to each other and then trying to guess them.
So, with the Why and the What clearly defined, I felt it was important to set boundaries for the What. This was my biggest weakness as I try to reach the sky and end up never doing even the bare minimum. So, this time I set clear boundaries. I will create a book of flashcards. The front side will have the clue and the back side has the answer. I initially decided to do 15 flashcards of vegetables and fruits. Somewhere along the way I lost track. Even spent time adding Indian food to the list. Luckily, after an hour or two, I somehow noticed that I was way off the why and went back to fruits and vegetables.
Now, how I did it: As mentioned before, early on I decided it will be a book of flashcards. I’ll be honest. Only when I’m writing this, I’m writing it as a book of flashcards. When I actually made it, it was more like clues in the front and the answer at the backside 🙂
So, this is when ChatGPT was all the rage and I was curious to see how it works. I have used it a couple of times for very basic things to test it but I didn’t know much about it. Like everything I do, when I jump, I jump into the deep end. Hence, this book became a pseudo-reasoning as to why I needed to test ChatGPT (free version).
Starting with ChatGPT: My immediate aim was to simplify the task. My friend was going back to the stone age in 2 weeks. So, let me try to finish this within a day or two. So, I wanted to get a list of vegetables and fruits that her kids would be familiar with and not just vegetables and fruits that are popular in India.
Hence, I started with the list of vegetables that are popular from where they are from. I was pleasantly surprised by how effective it was. I surely didn’t expect a reply such as this. So, now this set the ball rolling and I continued from here. I did a set of other questions to understand how to make the most out of ChatGPT for my need. Soon, I realized it was not as simple as it seemed as it was a bit tricky. The way I need to word the instruction was not straightforward. Most of the time, the replies were off such that I then spent the next couple of hours just toying around ChatGPT to understand how to phrase my questions.
No way, it was worth the time for this project as I’m sure a simple Google search would have been much easier and faster. But as I said, I was using this book as a way to muck around with ChatGPT and I felt the end goal of getting to know ChatGPT was worth the constant minor frustrations.
The above image was but the first 10 minutes of different variations of instructions I had tried for more than a couple of hours. I still have the complete history of this chat and when I see it now, I’m Oooff! Man, I had too much patience. The next image will show how I was struggling with the unclear rules of character limit to responses of ChatGPT. It would constantly stop halfway and I would have no clue why. I will keep asking hey you have missed this and that and it would very politely restart all over again and stop halfway with the responses.
Only after an hour or so, did I figure out that ChatGPT has a character limit of 2048 characters for its responses. It was sort of an ah-ha moment where I was able to put together all the issues I had with it and then all I had to do was keep asking it to continue with the previous response if the response stops halfway.
So, with this, it was more of a matter of iterations and elbow grease of keep repeating the same process for finding clues for vegetables and fruits. Then, iterate the clues such that they all have a pattern and the clues are about the size, shape, color, and taste of the vegetables and fruits. So, it took about 3-4 hours to get there but I was happy that I pushed the boundaries of my knowledge of what I can expect and the pitfalls in methodology of using ChatGPT.
Now, I have covered the why, the what, and the how I got to build the content of the book. The final part is the design/look of the book and for that, I turned to the best design software known to mankind: MS Powerpoint. 😛
Ok call me biased but most people have never used PowerPoint to the fullest. Back when I was working at IIT Madras for Lema Labs, most people didn’t even realize that all the animations and robot motion were shown just using humble PowerPoint and that was back in 2013. Ok ok. if I have lost you here, a quick tangent. I have spent more time worrying about how to get the one guy or girl in a class who hates engineering or science or just downright has been shunned by the system and hates studying. I spent a decade preparing with them as my ideal user persona and build courses, programs, and robots just to light the spark again. In that journey, PowerPoint was the key and after using it for a decade, it is almost second nature to use it for anything and everything 😀
Now, back to the design/look of the book. I knew PowerPoint has a nice feature that can design your slide in different ways if you can just drop max 5 images in a slide without any tests. So, I did just that. I used their stock images and their in-built online image search tools with a Creative Commons license. This way, I’m not stealing others’ hard work without crediting. The only issue was that I think the CC was either bugged or the filter only shows images that don’t have any creditor name. 98% of all the images with CC were Unkown by Unknown with no image name or credits. That was a bummer. I really want to put a clear reference for all the images as they became a central part of the book.
For then, I continued on, but I decided to no longer use the CC feature of Bing and possibly use some other image service in the next book. Anyway, this part took another 7-8 hours extra as once I finished it and sent it for printing, they wanted a specific format and had to recreate the entire book all over again. But I was happy with the outcome. |
In the 3rd part of the post, I will put all the images and videos of the book I made and the learnings I have gained from it, since giving it to my friend’s daughter and son and also another friend’s daughter.