NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Void where prohibited. Open to permanent legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec), 18 years of age or the age of majority in the entrant’s state/province as of 8/24/20. When customers submit meter readings through our site, they get the opportunity to spin our “Wheel of Fortune” (OooOoh). You get one spin per month, per fuel. Every month we have up to 10,000 lucky winners, who’ll each take home anything from £1 to £512 energy credit. Submitting meter readings isn’t exactly fun, and not many people know how crucial regular readings are to keeping your energy.

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You get one spin per month, per fuel. Every month we have up to 10,000 lucky winners, who’ll each take home anything from £1 to £512 energy credit. Submitting meter readings isn’t exactly fun, and not many people know how crucial regular readings are to keeping your energy account in check. We wanted a fun way to engage customers to submit readings, that also rewarded them for their extra effort. So, a few of our devs got to work creating the Wheel of Fortune.

We’ve had a number of questions about how the Wheel works. Is it really random? How many people reeeeeally win? WHY HAVEN’T I WON YET?

So we wanted to take a little time to explain more about it. So, here it is – the truth behind the happy spinny wheel, straight from one of the very developers who built it, Gilly...

Why did we build it?

Meter readings are absolutely vital to our business. They’re the foundation of everything we provide for customers. Meter readings are how we can tell how much energy you use, which we need to give you an accurate bill. On a larger scale, we need to be able to calculate how much energy our customers use altogether, so that we know how much green energy we need to buy from our renewable sources to put into the grid. Without accurate meter readings, we have to resort to that most fickle of tools: estimation. That’s not good for anyone. No one likes an estimated bill that might see you pay too much, or – if it’s too low – set you up for a surprise higher bill in the future. Regular meter readings help us understand your energy usage over the year, which helps us work out how much a regular monthly payment for you should be.

So we encourage all our customers to give regular meter readings however they can. Back in the early days (when we still measured customers in the thousands, and our office was one floor of a condemned building in Soho) we wondered whether we could offer people a reward for submitting readings online. We wanted to do this to save our hard-working and talented energy experts from too much copying and pasting of meter readings from emails, and encourage customers to use our super easy online function to submit theirs instead. This saves our customers and our team a little time.

Though we’re absolutely always happy to help with any query, our tech team like automating little work-arounds like this, so our team are freed up to help with the really complex problems that need someone to write a personal response, or be there to take a phone call, that no amount of automation or clever technology can solve. It’s what they're great at. The more we can get our technology to do for them, the more efficient our business is, and the cheaper we can make your energy bills.

Why a wheel?

Someone asked “Can we make a bit of a game out of it? Something you can play when you give readings online?” The idea went through various evolutions from there. First it was going to look like a slot machine. Then we settled on a wheel, thinking it would be fun to offer different kinds of prizes. In September 2017, we started work on a prototype. Then other things came up, and then it was Christmas, and then more things. Finally, in April 2018, the same week we were moving out of that condemned office building and into another down the road, we finally launched THE WHEEL! At that time, the monthly prizes on offer were £5 and £50 credits, and one £500 grand prize. That’s over £1000 a month in an attempt to get more regular monthly readings and take the load off our energy specialists

As time went on, and our customer numbers grew, it seemed fair to offer more prizes to win. We now have thousands of £1 prizes to give away each month, as well as £64 prizes and a £512 grand prize (because we like 8s). That brings our monthly give-away to over £5000 a month. We also show the number of people who have won each month when you give us a meter reading, so you can see how many of our prizes we’ve given away.

A side note on accessibility

We take accessibility seriously and we want anyone who is giving us online meter readings to be able to play. The wheel should be fully accessible to anyone using assistive technology (like a screen reader), and if you have any trouble with assistive tech and the wheel, please do get in touch on our dedicated accessibility mailing list. We’ve worked with users to fix bugs with the wheel this way, as well as helping people find workarounds for bugs in older versions of assistive software.

(Technical levels - 🌶️ Beginner 🌶️🌶️ Novice 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Developer)

Technical level: 🌶️

We assign the prizes randomly throughout the month, and we show how many prizes have been won so far when you submit a reading. When you spin the wheel, our prize randomiser checks whether your spin wins a prize, and then we show that in the wheel.

Talk is cheap, show me the code.

Technical level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

The interface of the wheel is built in React, and is backed by a couple of REST API endpoints. The spinning animation is controlled through CSS. The very earliest, most embryonic expression of that, was a cat that always landed on its feet. The thinking there is that the UI shouldn’t provide any direct input into the prize randomisation, as it could prove to be exploitable. All the randomness should come from the backend system. So the UI is just a fun way to display the same kind of process that would happen if you clicked on a button (which, if you take a look, is what the wheel actually is).

The interactive element for the spinning was coded from first principles using trigonometry (thank you Mrs Edwards, my secondary school maths teacher).

When you spin the wheel, it sends a POST request to fetch the prize, and we update the segment of the wheel that we know it will land on (because of the predictable animation).

Smart meter customers

If you're a smart meter customer and would like to play, just get in touch and we will provide you with a link.

Rewarding our loyal customers

We love our customers, and we try all sorts of games, competitions and projects that we think are a fun way of getting people to engage with us. We’ve given away cuddly toys, drive days, even a brand new Tesla! But if you’re looking for a simple, cast iron reward from us, all you need to do is use your referral link and get some friends and family to join us too. We’ll give you and them £50 of account credit when they join us directly. No randomisation, no spinning, just £100 to share and our heartfelt thanks.

Hey I'm Constantine, welcome to Octopus Energy!

The wheel of fortune? I know. I know. If I want you to continue reading, I’d better explain what it is. Have you ever seen the game show Wheel of Fortune? Yes, that one where you spin a wheel and get money if you successfully guess the missing letters in a word or phrase.

Good news. It can also be used to teach/learn English.

Unfortunately I am not working with primary or secondary students. I know they would love this tool. It’s a lot of fun to work with -spinning a wheel normally is, isn’t it?-, but it also has a lot of potential to teach/learn English. I teach adults and it normally takes them more time to get used to the way I teach. Sometimes, a far cry from traditional. Well, yes, I take my work very seriously but, from time to time, I like to spice up my lessons with little games and online tools to energize my lessons. This tool I’m using today is from classtools.net.

In this post, you’ll learn

1. How to feed the wheel
2. Ideas to use the wheel of fortune to teach/learn English

1. How to feed the wheel

• Click hereto get to the wheel
• Click on Edit and write whatever you want to see displayed on the wheel.
• Click on Save this list as currently shown
• Choose a password to edit the wheel in the future
• Make sure you make a note of the unique address of your wheel. I suggest you email yourself the link.
• After a name or category is selected you can remove it from the wheel.

2. Ideas to use the wheel of fortune to teach/learn English

Vocabulary

• Revising vocabulary. Very useful to revise vocabulary either as a whole class, in pairs or in competitions. Students will need to either explain the meaning of a word or use it in context. Nobody will ever accuse you of favouring a team and there are countless options when working with vocabulary. While you’re reading this article, I am sure your brain is already suggesting lots of possibilities, like irregular verbs, phrasal verbs, phonemic transcription…etc
• Another possibility to explore would be feeding the wheel with different topics and asking students to write or say as many words related to the topic as possible in one minute. Some easy topics could be: jobs, shops, nationalities, animals, food…etc.

Speaking

• Three minutes. Feed the wheel with different topics you want students to talk about and ask students to work in pairs and spin the wheel. They’ll have to talk about the topic for about three minutes. Great to revise for oral exams!
• Hot seat. Again feed the wheel with different topics you want students to talk about and divide the class into teams and ask a student from Team A to sit in the “hot seat”. Spin the wheel. Members of the other team need to ask him questions about the selected topic; he’ll need to talk for about three minutes answering the other team’s questions but his answers cannot contain the words YES or NO.
• Comparing. Do you want students to compare? Feed the wheel accordingly: compare living in the countryside/city, travelling by bus/plane, working as a teacher/shop assistant…etc

Writing

• Storytelling. Give students an inspiring story starter and feed the wheel with prompts they need to incorporate in their story. Spin the wheel and give students a minute to use the prompts in their stories. Spin the wheel as many times as you deem appropriate. Display on the walls of the class the stories for everybody to read.
• Using connectors. Feed the wheel with different connectors (and, but however, although,…etc). Ask students to work in pairs. On the board, write three sentences and ask students to choose one. Tell them this sentence will be the first in their stories. Spin the wheel and display the first connector they need to use. Spin the wheel as many times as you deem appropriate. Display on the walls of the class the stories for everybody to read.
• Dependent prepositions: feed the wheel with verbs such as depend, rely, insist…etc and ask students to write a sentence using the verb together with its dependent preposition.
• Order of adjectives. Are you teaching the order of adjectives before the noun? Feed the wheel with nouns and ask the students to write a sentence containing the noun modified by two or three adjectives.
• Verbs followed by infinitive/gerund. Are you teaching/learning verbs followed by infinitive or gerund? Rotate the wheel and ask students to write a short sentence containing the verb randomly chosen.

Spin The Fortune Wheel Spinner

I’m sure you have some more ideas to use this classroom tool, which is free and embeddable. Have fun while learning, have fun while teaching. 😉

Wheel Of Fortune Wedge Maker

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