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18th August 2011

Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader Now On Facebook

LudiaLudia Inc. and Mark Burnett’s One Three Television LLC have announced the availability of the Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? game for Facebook platform. Based on the syndicated TV game show, players across North America can now enjoy a multiplayer Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? experience with friends, family and the larger Facebook community.

“Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? is an acclaimed TV game show franchise that translates into an extremely Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?fun and social game on Facebook,” said Alex Thabet, Founder and CEO of Ludia Inc. “We’re thrilled to release yet another top game show property featuring multiplayer, simultaneous game play- a unique formula that has proven to be highly addictive for players and very successful for Ludia.”

Contestants simultaneously compete to correctly answer eight multiple choice questions pooled from different school subjects such as Art, World Geography, Earth Science, Math, Languages, and others, with the ability to use the “copy” cheat to help answer difficult questions. The top three players at the end of the first round have a chance at boosting “cash” earnings by correctly answering a 5th Grader Bonus Question. At the end of the game, a successful contestant can share winnings with friends, and brag about the win by posting it on his/her Facebook Wall.

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? on Facebook features:

  • Live, multiplayer game play with friends and other Are You Smarter 5th Grader fans, and the ability to follow friends’ grades and progress in the game.
  • Favorite elements from the You Smarter Than A 5th Grader TV show, including thousands of questions drawn from 10 different academic subjects, authentic theme music and the familiar “classroom” setting.
  • The ability to choose Facebook friends as “cheats” from whom players can “copy” an answer in order to earn bonus points and increase the chances of winning.

“This exciting game release brings a whole new dimension and audience to Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?,” said Mark Burnett. “We’re delighted to see the franchise continue to thrive on Facebook so that fans of the TV show and players who enjoy social games will have an outstanding interactive experience with the brand.”

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5th August 2011

Good World Games Announces MyConservationPark

Good World GamesMy sincere apologies to Good World Games – with the massive amount of SIGGRAPH 2011 emails being fired back and forth along with tasks on our to-do list, I completely missed this press release.MyConservationPark

Good World Games was founded in Toronto last year with the goal of creating socially conscious social games. Now based in Liberty Village, we are building a movement dedicated to helping important global causes through fun and educational games offered to a wide and engaged audience.

The studio’s first game, MyConservationPark is an innovative, planet-friendly social game allowing players to nurture their own virtual wildlife preserves based on real threatened species and habitats, while directly supporting non-profit organizations such as The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, Sea Shepherd and WildAid.

As the player, your mission is simple. You need to protect an endangered animal – your “hero” – from environmental and human threats while enriching the park with fauna and flora to create a sustainable habitat. Successfully conquer these challenges and balance the Eco-system and you will be rewarded with points and cash. Fail to do so and your hero and the Eco-system will suffer. When you purchase goods from the in-game store such as structures or animals, 15% of the revenue will be donated to our non-profit partners.

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12th July 2011

Streaming Colour Studios Releases Baby’s Musical Hands

streaming colour studiosStreaming Colour Studios proudly introduces Baby’s Musical Hands for iPad (99 cents Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later), featuring 15 brightly coloured squares that your baby can touch. Red squares make drum sounds, yellow squares play piano notes, and blue squares play guitar notes. Every time your baby touches the screen, colorful stars will burst from their fingers. Watch them delight in the audio and visual feedback!

“As a game designer and developer, I love my iPad. But as a new father, I realized how much my son loves it too. I decided I could put my experience developing for iPad to use, and build an app for my son to play with, and Baby’s Musical Hands was born!” says creator Owen Goss, founder of Streaming Colour Studios.

Features:

* Baby’s Musical Hands supports full multi-touch, meaning your baby gets the kind of feedback they expect when touching the screen.
* Baby’s Musical Hands respects the iPad’s mute switch and volume buttons, if you want your baby to enjoy a visual feast without the sounds.

Always one to encourage early adoption, here is a video of Trainyard creator Matt Rix’s  son Toren testing out the technology:

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+100 for cuteness 😉

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12th July 2011

SpongeLab Science Beta

spongelabToronto educational developer Spongelab Interactive has opened a beta run for SpongeLab, a revolutionary new web site that is a global science community with educational games, 3D animations and beautiful images, all integrated into a sophisticated teacher management system. Stunning and detailed science content linked with powerful teaching tool stitches all elements of the classroom together in one place. Assessment and reporting is made easy using a flexible system that provides detailed analytical information about the classroom environment, everything from student progress to engagement and user behaviours.

Educators can explore free digital content that can be organized into lessons, shared with students and presented in class. The opportunity to share goes even farther. Members of the Spongelab community can upload their own teaching materials such as images, lesson plans, videos and case studies making this site a current, vibrant open place for communicating about science.

Spongelab.com is also a game, encouraging users to earn rewards in the form of credits and experience points that can be redeemed for premium resources and features. Credits and experience points are earned by every action performed on the site: searching, viewing, creating, contributing, and referring. Redeeming credits provides access to more content at no monetary cost, opening up the world of science for everyone regardless of budget.

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30th June 2011

Boynton Classic Blue Hat Green Hat Now On iTunes

Loud Crow InteractiveLoud Crow Interactive Inc has released Sandra Boynton’s Blue Hat, Green Hat 1.0, the third title in their collaboration with Boynton Moo Media. Available now as a universal app on the iTunes Store for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch (regularly $3.99 USD, it’s on sale for $1.99), Blue Hat, Green Hat is a wry and light-hearted adventure in which children guide three earnest animals and one misguided turkey through various activities involving clothing and colors. The app offers narration by famed British Invasion rocker Billy J Kramer, the wonderful narrator of the bestselling Boynton app, The Going to Bed Book.
blue hat green hat
“I have a particular fondness for Blue Hat, Green Hat,” says Sandra Boynton. “At age three, my son Devin had a surprisingly hearty laugh for a small person – a laugh that would make everyone else laugh. I created this book long ago just to elicit that belly-laugh from him.”

Originally published in 1982, Blue Hat, Green Hat is one of Boynton’s all time bestselling titles, having sold over four million copies. Working closely with Loud Crow, Boynton designed the interactive concepts, wrote and produced the soundtrack with Michael Ford, and digitally recreated the original illustrations with new animations to ensure this interactive re-imagination delights fans while keeping true to the spirit of her widely-loved board book. Loud Crow then carefully worked its widely-praised technical magic to fully realize and enhance her interactive concepts.

“It was great fun to re-invent Blue Hat, Green Hat as an interactive e-book app,” says Boynton, “collaborating again with my endlessly clever Loud Crow friends. The digital dimension gave us so many terrific opportunities for adding theatrical flair to this spare yet decidedly Vaudeville book.”

Blue Hat, Green Hat is compatible with Phone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 3.2 or later.

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29th June 2011

TVO Launches My Canada Memory Game

TVOTVO has launched its first app for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. My Canada is a fun and engaging memory sequencing game just in time for Canada Day. Beginning today, My Canada is available as a free download for BlackBerry PlayBook on BlackBerry App World™. It is also available as an online game at TVOKids.com.

My Canada is the perfect game for parents who want to help their kids learn about Canada’s geography, and nurture their children’s sense of pride in their country. It helps kids ages 6-11 learn about the locations of the provinces and territories, the capital cities and Canada’s Great Lakes. At the same time, the game focuses on “working memory” which can help enhance important memory skills in kids.my canada

“We’re proud to announce the launch of TVO’s first app for the BlackBerry® PlayBook tablet,” says Lisa de Wilde, CEO. “My Canada is another example of the many ways TVO is using new digital media platforms to nurture important 21st century literacy skills and to complement classroom learning. My Canada makes learning about Canadian geography fun and accessible for kids.”

TVO’s My Canada memory game was designed with learning objectives that support the Ontario school curriculum and has been classroom and teacher tested and developed with TVO’s on-staff educator.

The introduction of TVO’s My Canada for BlackBerry PlayBook closely follows the recent launch of TVO’s two early learning mobile apps for BlackBerry® smartphones. Polka Dot Shorts and Flower Frenzy were downloaded over 250,000 times within the first two weeks of launching and recently held the number 2 and number 4 most downloaded positions on BlackBerry App World in the Education category.

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17th June 2011

New Field Mission From Rocketfuel Games

rocketfuel gamesCalling all secret agents – Rocketfuel Games has announced your latest assignment. Step One is to download the free app from the iTunes App Store and unlock the clues at a museum, science centre, zoo or aquarium in a city near you – see below for the currently available locations.

Upon completion of your mission sync your award to Discovery Kids: Seek Your Own Proof to earn tokens and special rewards. You can continue your career as a secret agent by customizing your avatar, playing online missions and puzzles, and defeating the villains of I.C.E.Discovery Kids Field Missions

While currently-available sites are limited, Rocketfuel invites their secret agent corps to submit locations for further investigation.  The free to download Discovery Kids Field Missions is rated 4+ and is compatible with  iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices running iOS 4.0 or later.

*Current Investigation Locations*

Canada

Lethbridge, AB – Galt Museum & Archives

United States

New York, NY – Discovery Times Square
Seattle, WA – The Burke Museum
West Palm Beach, FL – Johnson History Museum

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16th June 2011

TVO Kids Launch New Educational Online Game

tvo kidsCollect shiny gems raining down from the sky, but beware of lurking sea monsters, all while playing four exciting mini-games – in tvokids.com’s The Mysteries of Lagoon Bay.

TVOKids.com continues to lead the way in teacher-approved, kid-tested fun with the launch of its new online educational game that was developed in close collaboration with students from a Toronto community school. The Mysteries of Lagoon Bay, which launches today on the TVO Kids web site, is an online board game that can be played by one to four players on the same computer – perfect for families.

Built from the ground up, over a one-and-a-half year period, game developers and educators from tvokids.com worked with a group of 10 children, aged five to seven, to incorporate their ideas and preferences into an exciting and challenging game. Not only is it adjustable for different skill levels, but The Mysteries of Lagoon Bay finely balances a mysteriously fun game while reinforcing the Ontario school curriculum.

The tvokids.com team began by building a life-sized physical board game and workshopped it with kids to determine the best way to make the educational elements of the game really come alive.

Players select one of six unique characters and compete to collect the most gems by playing four types of mini-games. Each game is designed to help kids with adding (Nice Dice), patterning (Ball Fall), geometry (Shape Escape), and spelling (Word Herd). The game’s adventurous setting incorporates suggestions from kids to add hidden passageways, top-secret trapdoors and wonderful surprises.

“The Mysteries of Lagoon Bay is the result of a collaborative effort between kids and tvokids.com – we really listened to what they liked in their favourite games and tried to pack as much as we could in this game,” says manager of tvokids.com Marie Morency-Lee. “When we showed the kids the final game, they were excited and screaming, ‘This was my idea!’. The game is a great tool to practice math and language concepts while having a blast playing with friends and family.”

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2nd June 2011

Great West Life Releases Free Health App on iTunes

Great West LifeCanadian consumers want more education and options for health self-management. A Deloitte consumer study found 54 per cent of those surveyed in the Deloitte 2009 Canadian health care consumer survey report “Treating Patients As Consumers” are trying to learn how to prevent health problems and improve their well-being, and they want electronic tools to help them do so. Now consumers can access DrugHub, Great-West Life’s new, free health application for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, which they can personalize with their prescription information to help manage their prescription medications.

“Managing prescription drug usage can be complex, particularly for people with chronic health conditions or who require multiple medications over extended periods of time,” says Brad Fedorchuk, Vice-President of Group Marketing for Great-West Life, a leading Canadian life and health insurer, which processed $2.1 billion in prescription drug claim submissions in 2010. Taking prescription medications correctly as prescribed is one drughubsimple but effective way people can enhance their health self-management, and DrugHub can help them do so.”

The DrugHub app is intuitive and easy to use, and offers a convenient way to keep track of medications – in effect, putting “a virtual library of prescription drug information at your fingertips,” according to Fedorchuk. The application can also help track medications for aging parents, children, or others. “DrugHub displays multiple prescriptions, issues reminders for multiple individuals about when to take medications, tracks dosages and flags when it is time to order refills,” Fedorchuk says. “By helping to manage some of this complexity, we believe DrugHub can help people follow their medication dosages and schedules more closely, thereby improving health outcomes.”

Security and confidentiality features are built in to protect personal information. DrugHub also provides access to an extensive library of drug information, including simple-to-use drug interaction and side effect reference tools for each drug and access to thousands of physician-reviewed drug articles.

DrugHub is the first mobile health application to be issued by a Canadian group benefits insurer. The innovative health application builds on Great-West Life’s industry-first suite of eClaims services — including being the first and only insurer in Canada at this time to offer text message notification advising group plan members of the status of a claim.

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2nd June 2011

ICBC Releases Driving Knowledge App

icbcThe Insurance Corporation of BC has launched an app for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, that lets new drivers practice the driving knowledge test before taking the real test. The ICBC licensing mobile practice knowledge test can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store and also includes the complete Learn to Drive Smart guide, all driver licensing locations, and selected videos that are aimed at helping new drivers prepare for their test and be safe on our roads.

“Our customers have told us that they want more options from us that better connect with their lifestyle,” said icbc licensing appFred Hess, ICBC’s vice president of driver licensing. “Getting your first licence is an exciting time but it can also be an intimidating process. We believe this app will make it easier to practice, which we hope calms nerves and helps new drivers focus on learning to make smart driving decisions.”

The practice knowledge test app randomly generates 25 questions to replicate the real test, including how to successfully make a right-turn, drive in school zones, watch out for vulnerable road users and handle a vehicle that skids and loses control. Customers who score 100 per cent on a practice test are rewarded by unlocking bonus video content.

The app also includes a series of videos that help new drivers develop their skills on the road, including tips on passing the road test, how to adjust your speed relative to conditions and intersection safety. The app also identifies the driver licensing centre locations nearest to the customer, shows them how to get there, hours of operation and contact number.

“Our online practice knowledge test has proved extremely popular in improving our customer experience for new drivers and this app will offer another easy and convenient choice for them,” said ICBC’s chief customer and marketing officer, Jeff Schulz. “They can even share their practice test results with friends via Facebook, Twitter or email.”

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