hawt is happy to announce the long awaited major update to Tiny Shops Burgers.   This update introduces a new play mode as well as improved difficulty settings and more currencies.

Class Mode

Class Mode opens up Tiny Shops Burgers from a single player experience to a teaching and learning tool in the class room that can be used from Pre-School and up.

The Class Mode had always been planned from the early design phase and it was largely due to the huge amount of feedback from users of Tiny Shops Burgers that has driven us to deliver this mode sooner.

A majority of our educational users have identified that Tiny Shops Burgers have been fantastic in their schools as it provides a way for their students to play and learn in their own time (when ipad time are allocated to the class).

It has also been a major draw card for the Kindergarten kids.  However due to the nature of the game structure/difficulty (time restriction and failure after 3 attempts) it is difficult for them to fully enjoy the game and it's learning potential.

Class Mode addresses all of these issues, by removing the time limit and introducing the maths assistance feature (automatic register and change helper), and it open Tiny Shops Burgers to new ways of engagement for the early stage and stage 1 kids.

Some Kindergarten classes have incorporated Tiny Shops Burgers as a class collaborative learning tool with the teacher being the driver of the lesson.  It's amazing what a simple app, an Apple TV and a big screen can create excitement in young kids learning about addition, subtraction and recognition of Australian and foreign currencies.

Lesson Plans

Along with the introduction of the Class Mode, hawt is also busy working on a range of lesson plans which will provide ideas and inspiration on how Tiny Shops Burgers can be used in the classroom.  The lesson plans will cater for Early Stage 1, Stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3 as well as special education needs of the syllabus.

Download the Tiny Shops Burgers Lessons Plans here.

Lesson Plans is definitely a distinguishing feature hawt aims to provide in all our education products.  We test our apps with kids in a classroom environment with teachers who give us guidance on how best to be able to integrate and use it in the classroom maximising engagement, fun and learning outcome.

More Difficulty Levels

Tiny Shops Burgers now have multiple difficulty settings to cater for the younger kids who just love Tiny Shops Burgers but are finding it a little too difficult as well as those who are smarter and are looking for some crazy challenges.

The Story Mode retain the original difficulty level as "Classic", while introducing a "Trainee" and "Workaholic" level.  The "Trainee" mode eases the player into Tiny Shops Burgers with simpler maths, more relaxed pacing (customers stays happy for longer and rarely ever leave the shop) and lower target earning amount.  While the "Workaholic" mode takes Tiny Shops Burgers to the extreme with crazy menu pricing and easily agitated customers.

Now there are difficulty levels that will cater for the "Maths Apprentice" to the "Jedi Mathsters"!!

More Currencies

With the fantastic support we are receiving from all over the world, the latest update now have 6 different currencies (plus the Tiny Shops Burgers' generic currency).  Tiny Shops Burgers now have Australian Dollars, New Zealand Dollars, US Dollars, UK Pounds, Euros and Canadian Dollars.

We hope to be able to keep on expanding this where possible to cater for more and more local currencies to make Tiny Shops Burgers more relevant for everyone.

Remember, the multi-currency option provide a fantastic way to increase the challenge as well as teaching kids the various type of currencies in the world.

Thank You

hawt would love to thank every review and feedback we have received so far for Tiny Shops Burgers.  It's been amazing with all the support we have so far from our users as well as all the great students, teachers and schools whom have volunteered their time in assisting us in building the best educational app possible.  We are currently working on multiple new and exciting projects and will need all your help again really soon.  

 

“The game is awesome and fun”
“I don’t like maths but I love this game!”
“This is an entertaining and educational program. I would certainly play this again”
“We loved the cute characters (VIPs <3) and the design of the game. The pressure was very motivating and was super addictive”

Year 3 - Year 6 students from Hurstville South Public School, Sydney, Australia

“This game allows the children to learn at their own pace. At a recent testing session, the children kept playing even after the lesson had finished.  Now that is the test of a good game!”

Phil Rouland, Principal, Hurstville South Public School, Sydney, Australia

“This game can be used by schools and at home, as it has the ability to turn on and off social media with ease.  In addition there is no in app purchasing or advertising, which as a parent is important to me."

Trish Pinna-Cartwright,  mother of three, Penshurst, Australia

No In-app purchasing | No advertising | Child safe content

GAMEPLAY
Have you got what it takes to run a successful burger franchise? Dealing with customer’s order, managing the queues and most importantly making sure they are charged the right amount. Make sure the customers are not left waiting for the burgers for too long or you are left with no customers at all!

In this game you progress through each week as the manager of the burger restaurant. As a special challenge you take on VIPs and customers with special requirements at the end of each week. The greater the challenge, the greater the rewards.

GAME FEATURES
- Hours of fast pace fun and loads of challenging levels
- Manage customer in the shop. Keep them moving along in the queue to keep them happy
- Special VIPs (Very Important people) enter the shop randomly to add to the challenge
- Special event – Family Day, Night Shift and many more
- Use images of real coins and notes from Australia, New Zealand and USA to teach and familiarise kids with the use of their and other currencies
- Plenty of in-game shop items (in game money only – no real In App Purchases with real money) to help the player with improving their results of each level

EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
- Financial Literacy
- Multi Currency
- Mental Maths
- Addition and Subtraction
- Shop Queue Management

Align with the following Australian National Curriculum Content Areas:
- Year 1 - Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA017) - Recognise, describe and order Australian coins according to their value
- Year 2 – Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA034) - Count and order small collections of Australian coins and notes according to their value
- Year 3 – Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA059) – Represent money values in multiple ways and count the change required for simple transactions to the nearest five cents
- Year 4 – Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA080) – Solve problems involving purchases and the calculation of change to the nearest five cents with and without digital technologies
- General Capabilities – Literacy, Numeracy, Information and communication technology capability, Critical and creative thinking, Intercultural understanding

- Designed, tested and fine-tuned with the assistance from children and teachers at a variety of public schools in Sydney, Australia

- Content is 100% safe for kids
- NO IN-APP PURCHASES
- NO IN GAME ADVERTISING

ABOUT US
hawt’s key vision and motto is “Education via Gamification”. Our objective is to create fantastic educational content that fits into the convention classroom disguise into a truly fun and engaging game format where kids loves to play.

PRESS/MEDIA

Tiny Shops Burgers Press/Media Kit

PRESS/NEWS RELEASE

“Tiny Shops Burgers”, released in the Apple Store on December 1st 2013, is an educational mobile game for the iPad, iPhone and iPod developed by the innovative software provider, hawt .

“Tiny Shops Burgers” is the first game released by hawt with a focus of financial literacy and is aligned closely to the Money and financial mathematics content areas (ACMNA017, ACMNA034, ACMNA055, ACMNA059 and ACMNA080) of the Australian Curriculum.

Even though “Tiny Shops Burgers” has close alignment with specific content areas of the Australian Curriculum, fun was the main focus and it was designed to be a game first and an educational application second.

One of the prime features of “Tiny Shops Burgers” is that it is localised for Australian kids as it specifically aligns to the Australian Curriculum and has Australian Currency (Notes and Coins) used within the game.  “Tiny Shops Burgers” also allows the use of other currencies and thus creating an international audience/market for the game.  It currently features Australian dollars, US Dollars, New Zealand Dollars as well as a generic currency.  Future updates will incorporate more international currencies.

The android version will be released in mid December/early January 2014.

GAMEPLAY:
“Have you got what it takes to run a successful burger franchise? Dealing with customer’s order, managing the queues and most importantly making sure they are charged the right amount. Make sure the customers are not left waiting for the burgers for too long or you are left with no customers at all!

In this game you progress through each week as the manager of the burger restaurant.  As a special challenge you take on VIPs and customers with special requirements at the end of each week.  The greater the challenge, the greater the rewards.”

OK – that’s fine but what do children think?

“The game is awesome and fun.”
“I don’t like maths but I love this game!”
“This is an entertaining and educational program.  I would certainly play this again.”
“We loved the cute characters (VIPs <3) and the design of the game.  The pressure was very motivating and was super addictive.”

Year 3 - Year 6 students from Hurstville South Public School, Sydney, Australia

Again that’s fine, but what about adults?

“This game allows the children to learn at their own pace. At a recent testing session, the children kept playing even after the lesson had finished.  Now that is the test of a good game!”

Phil Rouland, Principal, Hurstville South Public School, Sydney, Australia

“This game can be used by schools and at home, as it has the ability to turn on and off social media with ease.  In addition there is no in app purchasing or advertising, which as a parent is important to me."

Trish Pinna-Cartwright,  mother of three, Penshurst, Australia

GAME FEATURES
– Hours of fast pace fun and loads of challenging levels
– Manage customers in the shop.  Keep them moving along in the queue to keep them happy
– Special VIPs (Very Important People) enter the shop randomly to add to the challenge
– Special events – Family Day, Night Shift and many more
– Use images of real coins and notes from Australia, New Zealand and USA to teach and familiarise kids with the use of their and other currencies
– Plenty of in-game shop items (in game money only – no real In App Purchases with real money) to help the player with improving their results of each level.

Even though Tiny Shops Burgers is extremely close to release, we have still quite a lot of loose end to tidy up before we can wrap up the project for a live release.  We have chose to partner up with Kickstarter to help us in generating some much needed assistance (although a relatively small amount of money) so that we can complete the game sooner rather than later.

Kickstarter also gives us a unique opportunity to involve all of you into the creation and completion of the game.  One of our highest reward in the Kickstarter project will give the backer the opportunity to be transformed into a Tiny Shop's universe character and be injected into the game as a customer.

We've been looking for ways to allow our supporters to be more involved and what better way to do this then being in the actual game itself.

We really appreciate any contribution to the Tiny Shops Burgers project, no matter how big or small.  Thank you all for your continuing support.

You can support us on Kickstarter here

In the development of Tiny Shops Burgers, not only did we aim to deliver an app that is fun and engaging to our target audience (children between 7-13), we at hawt have made a special effort to ensure that we are delivering educational content that matches to the Australian National Curriculum.

This is important for us as one of our goal is to offer digital resources that can be used in classrooms around all the public and private schools in Australia.

Our philosophy is simple:

- research content area that aligns to the Australian National Curriculum

- identify an area (or areas) that we believe we can transform into an engaging game via gamification
- test, test and test the product to ensure that the children playing the app are engaged in the game and are not force fed content from the curriculum, while at the same time ensure that the curriculum content is encapsulated and delivered in a meaningful way.

Tiny Shops Burgers is based around the concept of running a burger shop where the gamer's responsibilities include:

- Customer management (logic, resource management),
- Determine the customer order (language for interaction and currency),
- Adding up the total amount to charge the customer (addition and multiplication, decimal and currency), and
- Determine and give change to the customer using Australian currency (addition and subtraction, decimal and currency).

Tiny Shops Burgers' content most align (but not exclusively) with the following Australian Curriculum Content Area:

- Year 1 – Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA017) – Recognise, describe and order Australian coins according to their value
- Year 2 – Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA034) – Count and order small collections of Australian coins and notes according to their value
- Year 3 – Number and place values (ACMNA055) – Recall addition facts for single-digit numbers and related subtraction facts to develop increasingly efficient mental strategies for computation
- Year 3 – Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA059) – Represent money values in multiple ways and count the change required for simple transactions to the nearest five cents
- Year 4 – Money and financial mathematics (ACMNA080) – Solve problems involving purchases and the calculation of change to the nearest five cents with and without digital technologies

Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)

As much as we would love to cover all aspects of the national curriculum or inject as much educational content into our educational apps, we also recognise the need to balance content with engagement.  The content delivered in any app/game is only useful if it manages to grab the student's attention and engage them in using and re-using the app.  Like teaching in a classroom environment, the delivery and engagement is the most important and is often the toughest part of the process.

We look forward to everyone's feedback as to how best to improve Tiny Shops Burgers and any future education apps we release.  We value the feedback from the end users as well as schools, teachers and parents as we strive to provide a product that can be both fun and educational.