Mascots
The WPCampus community has two official mascots: Eduwapuu and Truck Sheep.
Eduwapuu
Eduwapuu is the WPCampus and higher education variant of the wapuu, an unofficial WordPress mascot.
Eduwapuu is the official Wapuu for the WPCampus community and all involved in higher education.
Wapuu are the unofficial mascot for the WordPress project. They exist under the General Public Licence (GNU), which means anyone can access the original Wapuu files to customize the character and create their own Wapuu variation. There are hundreds of available custom wapuu variants.
WPCampus member, Elaine Shannon, created our Wapuu variant, Eduwapuu, which can be spotted on various WPCampus swag. You can buy Eduwapuu items from the WPCampus Shop. You can also use Eduwapuu as an emoji inside the WPCampus Slack workspace.
The Wapuus Field Guide website has a great writeup on the history of wapuu, a wapuus archive, and an Eduwapuu listing featuring tweets and images of Eduwapuu.
Truck Sheep
The current (and second) representation of Truck Sheep, our unique community mascot.
Our other mascot, Truck Sheep, is unique to our community and came to life during our WPCampus 2018 conference.
Truck Sheep can be spotted on various WPCampus swag, including the WPCampus 2020 Online t-shirt. You can buy Truck Sheep items from the WPCampus Shop. You can also use Truck Sheep as an emoji inside the WPCampus Slack workspace.
The origin story
Our story begins during the event’s game night at Three Kings, a pub near the campus of Washington University in St. Louis in St. Louis, Missouri.
A group of conference attendees played a game of Telestrations, a party game in which players are prompted to sketch a word listed on a card and guess what the other players have drawn.
The origin drawing of Truck Sheep, which was part of a game and supposed to represent a toy poodle.
The word was “toy poodle” and WPCampus member, Jeff Stevens, drew a beautiful truck and poodle. As WPCampus member Paul Gilzow later shared: “my brain, however, was having none of it and was convinced that the poodle was a sheep”. As time ran out, and with no clear answer in mind, Paul took a guess and wrote down “Truck Sheep”.
According to Paul: “If you’ve never played Telestrations, it is quite hilarious to see how the initial phrase morphs as it moves from player-to-player. When it came around, “Truck Sheep” struck our funny bones, and most of us in the game were struggling to breathe from laughter.”
The next day, Truck Sheep cemented its place in WPCampus history when Paul used the name as his handle during our trivia game at the event’s closing remarks. The name “Truck Sheep” continuously flashed on the large screen whenever the trivia platform displayed the top 3 contestants. By the time Paul won the trivia game, everyone’s interest was extremely piqued. Paul explained what had happened the night before.
The first representation of Truck Sheep was created using a truck and ram emoji.
When everyone returned home from the event and began to settle back into our Slack workspace, the story, laughter, and warm fuzzy feelings generated by the experience of Truck Sheep lived on. WPCampus member Mike Henderson created an emoji so we could breathe even more life into our new friend.
Truck Sheep has continued to live on and bring smiles to our members.
For WPCampus 2019, the WPCampus Director, Rachel Cherry, gave Truck Sheep a design upgrade and a new Slack emoji. The update gave our beloved mascot a more versatile appearance and bestowed our friend with WPCampus community colors.