NeoScholar Grants

The NeoScholar Trust will give one time awards of between 200,000 and 500,000 NP to qualified Neopians who submit an application which includes an essay that is of a high quality as judged by the NeoScholar Trust Committee. In addition to the NP award the succesful applicants will be listed up on this site as NeoScholars and their essay will be posted if they give permission.

To encourage fairness and to remove fears about privacy the NeoScholar program will strictly adhere to the following rules:

• the scholarship is only open to children, between the ages of 13 and 18. If you are younger than that you need parental consent. If you are older, you should be able to enough of your own money or find something else to do.
• at no time will the actual names of applicants be used, only Neopet usernames, this includes in application forms, only email will be used, applicants can create a new anyonymous email adress for the program if they wish
• essays must only be on of the accepted topics

• Your neopet username. (Do not submit your real name or where you live, we don't need to know that and you should not make a habit of telling people online personal information.)
• What grade in school you are in. (Again, you don't have to tell us what school you are in. We only need to know your grade so we can judge your essay appropriately for your writing level.)
• A short paragraph describing what you plan to do with the award. (build a house, buy blumaroo dolls, buy codestones, etc.)
• Your essay. The essay should be two or three pages and written in proper English which a good style and a beginning, middle and end. It must be from the list of accepted topics.

Neopets is a popular electronic pet webgame, in fact its the largest such site on the internet with over 130 million users by their own reckoning. Here is some history and background on the site. Neopets is used as a loyalty generating tool to fuel merchandising revenue and is targetted largely at children but is guiltily played by many adults as well.

I may have an pet or two myself :)

There are many games available to play ranging from arcade style to problem solving, including gambling and stock market games. There is also an involved fantasy storyline with quests and a battle arena where friends can pit their pets, which resemble Pokemon cartoons, against each other.

The virtual world these pets inhabit is called Neopia and the currency of Neopia is NeoPoints or simply NP. NeoPoints can be used within the game to buy food, clothing, homes and weapons for your pets and are earned by playing the games. I don't play many games on Neopets, I don't battle other pets or participate in the quests. However I do take a little joy in playing the virtual stock market of Neopia. It isn't hard to become quite wealthy by Neopia standards doing this without committing too much time. What is hard is spending the NP without committing too much time. So I, and others like me, have a need for an outlet for Neopia wealth that might have some positive influence on the world. This is why I created the NeoScholar program. The goal is to reward intelligent and studious children playing NeoPets with large NP grants.

The motivation is to encourage children to do something educational, like make a long term plan or write a thoughtful essay instead of spending lots of time playing Kelogg's branded video games. As well as breakfast cereal games there are room of "specials" where children can earn a thousand NP for looking at commercials. I find this disconcerting. That's why I created the NeoScholar program.