“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.

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....

A lot of people think that gamification is simply using reward system and points for motivating and altering user behaviours.  And obviously they are right.  But this is also a very simplistic view of what gamification is or should be.

Reward systems and achievements is simply one element of gamification but it's definitely not the only element nor the most important part.  The core and hardest component to get right with gamification relates to the motivation triggers of the user(s) and finding a fun and engaging activity that will alter their behaviour.

At hawt, we see gamification as a mantra and is a part of the toolkit available to us to inspire and motivate.  Finding, locating and targeting the motivation factor of each user is the key to user engagement.

Personally, gamification is a way of life, literally.  I may have only learnt about gamification in the past few years, but I've been using and applying gamification concepts from way back.  On reflection, gamification is the clear method by which  I manage my own motivations starting from a very young age.

One of the earliest example I can think of the application of Gamification was the game that most kids play when dragged around with their parents shopping or going somewhere.  The game's goal was simply to avoid the cracks or only walk on the cracks.  I'm sure a lot of you all may have done this.  Why and how is this gamification?  Obviously I was bored having to go from place to place with my parents and by playing this simple game it certainly make the travel between the destination a little more fun.

At school, I remembered being punished and had to write lines and lines of the same sentence (about 200 times).  Rather than doing the lines one sentence at a time, I started to do every few words per line and worked out where the 100th line is and then the 200th line.  Next, I decided to do every 25th line.  What did this do, it turned the boring task of doing lines a little bit more enjoyable.  It broke up the monotony and made it fun (well, as much fun as being punished to write lines could possible be).  The break at every 25th line, sets little milestones, which is like an achievement knowing how much I have completed and how many more to go.

My childish behaviour continued into my first job in the real world.  As a graduate in an accounting firm, there were lots of boring meetings where I have no idea what's going on.  What I (and a few other graduates) liked to do was to play "Buzzword Bingo".  Prior to the meeting we would come up with a list of 10 buzzword each and who ever can cross them off first wins.  Were we rude in doing this, possibly slightly, did it keep us awake in the meeting and at least actually catching and understanding some of it, you bet.

Another game I love to play in the work place when I am dealing with people whom I may not have the greatest respect for (there are a few that I've come across in my time) is "Word Bluff".  This is a game where I would come up with a few words (even better if you have a partner in crime, which I often did, who would come up with the words for you) which you have to try to use and say in the meeting with these individuals.  A point system is in place to score higher for words or phases that are harder to be used in the meeting.  Points are doubled if you get the other person using the word and triple points if the word/phase or acronym is fake and completely made up just prior to the meeting.  And the point of this?  Well it makes an unbearable meeting and liaison with certain people a little less painful.

I have lots more little games that kept me going at school, motivating myself to complete work tasks, and ways to help my dealings with difficult people.

This may just be me and many people may think I'm a nutter to play such childish games, but that's just the point, the childish games are there to motivate me to complete something or to do/achieve a task which I either find mundane/boring or downright repulsive.  Different people have different ways of dealing with things, and for me this is how I find it is best to managed.

Obviously, different people may use different ways/games to manage their situation.  Let us know a few of the ways you may have inadvertently applied gamification in your life without even knowing it.  Comment here or post on our Facebook Page or Tweet us.

If you haven't already noticed, we at hawt are aligned with the term gamification.  Our company's vision is "Education via Gamification", but what does "gamification" mean?

According to Wikipedia:

Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users and solve problems. Gamification is used in applications and processes to improve user engagement, Return on Investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning. The word was coined by Nick Pelling.

There are lots and lots of other theories and papers behind what "Gamification" means or should be and we won't go into it in this post. If you are interested however, just do a quick search for gamification on Google and you will find loads of resources relating to gamification.

What is important here is how do we, at hawt interpret and apply gamification in our educational games/apps.

Gamification to us are many things but at the core, it is about modifying the users (or learners) behaviour using methods which is engaging and motivating.

What we are seeing is that many education apps on the market have a strong focus on the educational content/outcome but has little or no consideration of the end users  or learners who will be using them.  A lot of them have pretty graphics and sounds for the target audience, however, often the polish is only surface deep and does not have any gaming/motivational elements to engage and keep the learners coming back.

Learners will often only use these apps when they are required or instructed to but are lacking self-motivation to continue using/learning from these apps.  You can have the best educational content in the world but if no one utilises it then it may as well not be created.

At hawt, we believe the gaming component is the key element of motivation for our target learners to be engaged in our apps, and the education content is simply a by-product.

This does not mean that we don't value or care about the educational component.  In fact, we value our educational content so highly, we make sure our learners are constantly engaged and always wanting to play/learn one more time (without them even knowing).

I suppose that is our ultimate goal.  We want our users to be constantly learning and improving without even knowing it.  We want our users to be so immersed in the gaming design and concept, that everything they may find boring or mundane in the learning process disappears and is actually turned upside down so that they are itching to learn or play more.

Lofty goals, sure, and we at hawt will give a good crack at it.  If our games can motivate our users to play and learn from our game just a few more times than they otherwise would have, then it's mission accomplished from our point of view.

In coming posts, we will talk more about 'gamification' and why we value it so highly, not only in our apps but in how we work and as a way of life (sounds deep doesn't it?).  We will also be releasing more information about our upcoming educational game/app to be released on iTunes via the Apple iOS App store and the Android Market in Q3/Q4 2013.

We have been busy hidden away working on our great little grand plans to inject some much needed gamification to the education sector.

Our first target is to provide support to the many great Australian's school initiatives into the great wide world of mobile (tablets and phones/ipods) learning.

There are many great resources out there already and we don't claim to be the first to provide resources to this sector.  However we do believe that there are many gaps that are out there and also there is a great divide between a learning resource that is target at learning and a learning resource that are target at engaging the learners.

This is where our gamification philosophy kicks in.  We aim to take a gaming model to learning.  Our mobile apps will tune down the volume on learning (at least on the surface) and crank it up on fun and motivation.

How well we succeed in this will depends on the balance of the gaming concepts and the learning content integration.  There is definitely a fine line between this and slightly unbalanced on each side will result in something that is trying too hard to be fun and failing or lacking enough educational content for it to be truly useful.

This is where WE WANT YOU (to take a leaf from The Voice).  We are looking for Australian Primary Schools that have iPad programs in place to help guide us through this important stage of the fine tuning process of the potential valuable resources that can be offered to your school.  Our main goal is to offer free resources to the Public Schools of Australia and this is a chance where you can help ensure this free resource is as useful as possible.

We are a small startup with big dreams.  We are currently based in Sydney.  As much as we want to open this invitation to all schools in Australia, I think we need to be realistic and (at least initially) ask for assistance from NSW.  However, hopefully as we all progress down this journey (we have been watching The Voice way too much), we can open this offer and get involvement from all schools around Australia.

If you are a primary school in the NSW SYDNEY region (or part of the P&C of a school) and think this is something that you are interested in being involved in, pop us an email to info@hawt.com.au and ask about our Apps Pilot School Program.

Things happens for a reason.  Even though there are a few things that haven't worked out as planned in the past weeks, new doors open and pushes us along and forcing us to dig deep and move forward yet again.

We have been a little hush hush about the many announcements we have and we may be at a stage where we can start telling the world....

How does the saying go?  "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"?  Well, when life doesn't even gives you those lemons what do you do?  We know what we are doing...

We are going to source some quality oranges and make some awesome orange juice to beat those holding on to the lemons for their mates.........

Keep checking back here for some awesome announcements soon........

On the path of setting up the many different ways of keeping our communication open to everyone....

follow, like, +, link and whatever else the social media butterfly does to us to keep up to date of our development and releases.

   

A lot of things are happening at hawt and it is impossible to keep everything up to date.....   we have many announcements on the way that we are dying to release, however due to discussions, negotiations and all things business we are not able to say anything at all.....    it's normally hard to keep our big mouth shut, and it's especially the case when we are told we can't say anything.....  oh well... good things come to those who wait (and we definitely want to have good things!!)  :)

One thing we can talk about is that we are on the lookout for some fantastic contributors to our dev team....  if you have some mad skills that you think can contribute, drop us a line and let's discuss how we can work together........