Many thanks to those who participated in this past weekend’s auction! Thanks to the high bidders and some particularly kind people who made bidless donations, we brought in a total of $918 towards school supplies from Donors Choose, supporting
- construction paper, paintbrushes, dry erase markers, and crayons
- posterboards and resource books for a science fair
- a Dell laptop
- two Lego Mindstorms kits
- worms for teaching about composting, terrarium supplies, and three live frogs
- five pre-packaged STEM lab projects, an electricity activity set, and an inflatable solar system demonstration set
- thermometers, beakers, pipettes, and other basic lab supplies
- a non-fiction selection of science books and biographies
- classroom subscriptions to TIME for kids and SuperScience magazine
(Some of these projects also received partial support from other Donors Choose donors.)
I really appreciate the response. This is a cause that means a lot to me. [ETA: and someone anonymously added a donation for a planetarium field trip, bringing the total to an even $1K. Thank you, anonymous benefactor!]
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
That’s pretty awesome. Good job!
This was a fun process and I’m glad I was able to participate.
If it’s OK with you, would you mind sharing what was the most requested task? I saw the first time you did an auction like this before and I was curious what many wanted help with.
People don’t usually tell me what they have in mind until they know whether they’ve won or not, so I don’t actually know the intentions of most of the non-winning bidders; and then, requests are often for help on projects that the bidders aren’t yet ready to announce publicly. So I don’t want to go into too much detail about specific commissions without the bidders’ permission.
However, in vague terms, based on a couple of auctions and some other arrangements I’ve made with people over the years: sometimes people want design help, like coming up with a story hook or talking through a puzzle concept. Sometimes they want actual code help, especially for Inform 7-related stuff, because they’re stuck or they think there must be a better solution than the one they had. Once I wrote a small custom IF game for someone to give as a gift, tailored to the recipient’s tastes and complete with cover art and a feelie. Another time, I ported someone’s partially finished game from another IF language into Inform so that they’d have something to work from.
Really, the main running theme is that the tasks are a bit too big, complicated, or idiosyncratic to ask someone to do just as a favor, but not marketable or large-scale enough to be worth setting up a full-scale paid consultancy arrangement.
That was certainly interesting. Thanks for the reply!