Welcome back to another exciting school year, MOUSE Squad! To kick things off the right way, we've got another fantastic MicroProject challenge here for you.

Make a logo for your squad and share it on your public Squad Page!

You may already know that your Squad Page is an awesome resource for your Help Desk with tools like CaseTracker and Wins!Tracker. You probably also know that everything you put in your Squad's "About Us" section is available on your public Squad page. That's the page you see when you go to www.mousesquad.org/squads/YOUR_SQUAD'S_NAME_HERE. We want you to start things off by personalizing your public Squad Page with your own logo. When anyone goes to submit a case, they'll see the awesome new logo YOU designed!

You may have seen some of these logos before:

What about this one?

This is the MOUSE Squad Logo. We spent a lot of time designing it to show what Mouse Squad is all about in a simple way. A good logo conveys feeling and atmosphere just from looking at it.

Get together with your squad and think about what you want your logo to look like. Your logo represents your squad, so take some time to figure out what it is that makes your squad special. Think about things like fonts, images and colors and what these different visual elements say about your squad. Feel free take part of our logo and rework it to include your Squad's name or just to put it somewhere on your squad's own brand new logo.

• Does your school have a mascot? You can put that in your logo!
• Does your school have school colors? Use those in your logo!
• Think about what font you want to use. We love the font "Love Ya Like a Sister" here at MOUSE. You can download it and a lot of other fonts dafont.com
• For bonus points use a picture of your squad or make your own image from scratch

Need help getting creative with your logo? Check out our activity in Module 2!

Examples!

You can make your logo really simple like this:

Here are some other examples made by MOUSE Squad members in the past:

Once you know what you want your logo to look like, use one of these free tools to create it!

• Live Brush (Free, Mac or PC)
• GIMP (free, mac, pc or linux)
• MS Paint (pc only, free)
• Pixlr (free, online, mac, pc or linux)
• InkScape (free, mac, pc or linux)
• Sumo (free, pc, mac or tablet)
• Photoshop (mac or pc, not free - ask your coordinator)

When you're done, have your coordinator log in to MouseSquad.org and embed it on your Squad Page in the "About us" section. Finally, make a blog post with a link to your Squad Page to share your awesome new logo with the entire national MOUSE network!

To submit your logo to us, add the logo to your Squad Page and make a blog post with the link to the page.

Now when people go to submit new cases on your Squad Page they'll see your awesome logo!

MicroProject winners receive:

• a $60 Best Buy gift card for the Grand Prize winner!
• Papertronics Lunar Modules for 2 runners up! Papertronics are paper toys with paper electronic circuits in them that you build yourself!

We hope you have fun making your squad's logo. We can't wait to see it everywhere!