Polly Sparks

Polly Sparks (originally known as Polly Spark) is a female human character who debuted as the primary antagonist of JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain. She is Professor Spark's third-grade daughter, and Botley's main purpose is the unenviable task of keeping her under control.

Appearance
In JumpStart 3rd Grade and JumpStart Typing, Polly has blonde hair set in pigtails with orange hairbands. She wears large oval-shaped glasses with blue lens, what appears to be a lab coat worn as a dress, bright green socks, and red and white sneakers. One of her socks is pulled all the way up while the other is rolled down slightly. Most of the time, her eyebrows float above her head in a cartoonish fashion, though they tend to come down onto the tops of her glasses when she's in a particularly diabolical mood. According to some promotional material for JumpStart 3rd Grade, she is a third grader.

Polly's artwork for the Advanced series re-release of JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade and JumpStart Power Prep depicts her with a more realistic art style. She has blue irises, blonde eyebrows, and her glasses are clear with a light blue rim. She wears blue hairbands instead of orange, and she also wears blue jeans and a different kind of sneakers.

In JumpStart Power Prep, Polly's appearance strongly resembles her original design, with some minor differences such as her socks no longer being asymmterical, and her glasses being round instead of oval-shaped.

Personality
In JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain is portrayed as a spoiled brat with an enormous ego, at one point proclaiming that she is the center of the universe (before altering history to make that statement reality). She belittles others such as Botley, and regularly calls him names such as "Snotley," "Potley", "Rotley", and "Dotley." In the version 1.0 release of the game, Botley mentions that before he was created, Professor Sparks always had trouble finding babysitters for Polly since she would scare them all away.

In JumpStart Typing, Polly can still be egotistical and boastful, although not nearly to the same degree as her portrayal in JumpStart 3rd Grade. She can still resort to unreasonable actions as a result of her temper, such as locking Coach Qwerty in a trophy room after he kicked her from her father's typing team. However, she seems much more willing to admit to her wrong-doings when confronted by Botley, and also more willing to personally fix the troubles she's caused. One consistency between her portrayals in 3rd Grade and Typing is that in both games her bad deeds arise out of wounded pride resulting from the fact that she apparently considers herself intellectually superior to others.

In JumpStart Power Prep, Polly is once again depicted as fairly egostical, but also appears to be considerably nicer at times. She says that she wants to help kids be the best they can be by using her quiz show to get smarter. She will praise the player for correct answers, although sometimes she may do so reluctantly, or while simulanteously praising herself in the same sentence.

JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain
Polly serves as the game's antagonist. In the game's introduction, she states that her teacher gave her class a surpise quiz. Polly proclaims that she already knew all of the answers, but decided to make up her own answers as a joke. However, she is shocked when she recieves a zero on the exam. She then gets the idea to go back in time and change history so that all of her quiz answers become correct.

The game makes her out to be rather fiendish considering that many of her changes to the timeline would almost certainly result in serious danger, such as causing people to believe that radium isn't dangerous and therefore continue to use it in luminous paints, though it is unlikely she is entirely aware of the damage she can cause. Her actions would also give her a degree of personal power verging on world domination.

She also appears to have a small robotic lackey, who looks somewhat like a floating shark. This robot delivers Botley and the user new TransQuizzer disks, can occasionally be seen attempting to sabotage the Mountain's generator with a banana and appears with Polly in her father's secret chamber at the beginning and end of the game.

JumpStart Typing
Polly wants to be on the Sparks Typing Team, but after Coach Qwerty kicks her from the team for not practicing her typing enough, she locks him in the Trophy Room. After Botley confronts her about her actions, she agrees to let Coach Qwerty out. However, when she initially tries to unlock the Trophy Room, it doesn't work because the Power Cards needed to unlock the door aren't charged. Polly suggests that she and Botley coach the team together, and Botley finds himself unable to decline. At the end of the game, she apologizes to Coach Qwerty for her actions, and he forgives her.

Interestingly, this is the first time she and Botley actually appear together, since, in JumpStart 3rd Grade, she remains in her father's secret chamber, apparently the Mountain's control room, for the entire game and communicates with Botley and the player only through a series of video monitors.

JumpStart Power Prep
Polly is the main character and host of a quiz-show style game that she created herself.

In Books
Polly appears in the JumpStart Summer Vacation Activity Book for 3rd Grade. In the "Where's Botley?" activity pages, the reader is presented with a scene, and asked to find where Polly, Botley and Egbert are. Polly and Botley are also the main characters of a short story included in the book called "Mystery Mountain Munchies".

Trivia

 * Polly, Ms. Grunkle, and Repsac tie for the very first villains ever to appear in the JumpStart series, due to JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade and JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island being released on the same day.
 * Out of these three, Polly is the only one to have more than one appearance.
 * Polly and her father's last name was Spark in JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade, but in JumpStart Typing it was changed to Sparks, and has remained that way since.
 * In the Robot Kitchen activity in JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade, two dishes are attributed to Polly: Polly's Summer Squash and Polly's Chocolate Pudding Supreme.
 * Polly is the first JumpStart antagonist to get a redemption arc later on, as seen in JumpStart Typing.