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.

hawt is happy to officially announce the upcoming release of Tiny Shops Burgers, the first in a series of education apps from hawt for Apple and Android mobile devices.

Tiny Shops Burgers core focus is fun, learning, engagement and challenge.  The user is transported to the fun world of being the manager of a Burger Franchise, where they are in charge and responsible for making sure the diners are getting their order correct and on time.  Special events and VIPs adds to the excitement and challenge of running Tiny Shops Burgers. 

hawt is working with multiple education providers and schools to deliver games that will deliver sufficient education content while balancing it with our gaming background to ensure it is a genuine gaming experience.

We at hawt are passionate... passionate about games and passionate about education... and we believe that nothing is better than learning while playing a game that is actually fun and exciting.  Tiny Shops Burgers is coming soon…….. Watch out for the release!!!

It's been a long time coming and we are getting close to finalising all the testing and fixes to our first game.

Sorry it's taken longer than we first anticipated (isn't that always the way), but thank you to everyone who have helped out or have been interested and keen in the development of the game.

The good news is that our testing with various primary school with kids between Year 1 to Year 6 have been extremely positive.  The bad news (well not really bad news) is that kids are fantastic with testing and have identified bugs that no one else in the world would have ever picked up.  They also have had so many fantastic new ideas that we have to list out and juggle to determine whether to try to rush it into the first release or hold off for a second release/update.

Here's the sneak peek image of the Tiny Shops universe and some hint as to the world in which Tiny Shops resides.

Looking forward to the full release onto the Apple iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store.  More information to come really really soon....