Great news Q Racer fans. We’ve decided that we want to get Q Racer into as many hands as possible so we’re offering it FREE for a limited time. That’s right! It costs you ZERO dollars and you get the full version. Act quick and download your copy now…before we change our minds

As always you can check out our Press page to learn more about what other people are saying about Q Racer.

Great news Q Racer fans! Apple has approved and released our 1st update for Q Racer. This is an exciting update that includes:

• Game Center Achievements: Now you can login using Game Center and see how many achievements you can master.
• Updates to Lists: Updated the U.S. Senators, U.S. State and Territories Governors, and Important People in Obama’s Administration lists.
• Improved Categories: Now when viewing categories you can see what lists you have purchased.
• Bug Fixes: Less crashing and more learning.

Checkout the Updated Q Racer on iTunes.

As always let us know what you think. We love hearing from our players.

The fine folks over at Serious Games Market were kind enough to feature Q Racer in a blog post called “iPad and iPhone helping to create a Learning Ecosystem.”  If you aren’t familiar with the term “serious game” it’s defined  according to wikipedia as:

A game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The “serious” adjective is generally prepended to refer to products used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, religion, and politics.

The Serious Games Market blog highlights and promotes different serious games currently on the market and those in development.  They believe that Q Racer and other serious games being developed on the iPad, iPod touch, and the iPhone will help speed up the use of these platforms as legitimate learning frameworks in education systems.  Specifically:

Regardless who the software creator is, there is now enough hard evidence to declare that the increasing adoption of iPads and iPhones to create a Learning Ecosystem has also the potential to accelerate the adoption of Serious Games into Educational Frameworks.

We definitely hope more institutions end up integrating these platforms (and ultimately the software that will come along with it) into their educational frameworks.  With increased interest and use means the quality of the serious/educational games will get better.

It’s been a long journey for us here at Hug a Panda, but we are now very happy to announce the release of our first iPhone game, Q Racer!

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I’ve complained in the past about the lack of educational games choices for adults.  It seemed to me that once you pass 5 years old that your educational game choices disappear.  However after digging around a little bit it turns out there are some pretty decent choices out there (in addition to Q Racer of course).  Without further ado we present to you 15 iPhone games for adults who don’t mind learning a thing or two.

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If you guys aren’t familiar, Pimsleur is a language learning methodology and system.  It was developed by Dr. Paul Pimsleur who studied how people learned languages.  His research led to his theory of graduated recall which basically said that not only was repetition important for memorizing vocabulary, but equally important is at what time intervals you were asked to recall something.  The general principal being the more spaced out you are asked to remember something the more that something gets transferred into long term memory.  Not exactly something you wouldn’t expect, but still useful for figuring out what’s the best way to learn something.

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Techcrunch featured an article on a report by Distimo (a mobile phone analytics company) which showed how different categories of games performs in Apple’s App Store.  The bottom line is that Action, Adventure, and Arcade games seem to sell the most.  Since I wouldn’t classify Q Racer as Action, Adventure, or Arcade…This got me thinking…how do Eduational games fare in the App Store?

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Since we are working on an educational game (Q Racer) I’m always curious to see what other educational games have to offer.  I’ve complained about past educational games before (normally for their lack of fun) so I’m always on the look out for the truly innovative educational games.

Here are two gems I found courtesy of the Elder Geek.   This video explains all the fun filled stuff you’ll learn in Captain Novolin (game about diabetes) and Rex Ronan (game about experimental surgery).

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We’ve been looking into supporting our game via the “freemium” model so we started looking into putting ads into our game.   As cool as it sounds figuring out which ad network to use and how exactly ads work was a little daunting so I started researching all the different networks and compiling any articles or sites that help shed some light on the subject.  Here’s some of my research in the hopes that you find it useful especially if you are thinking of putting together your own iPhone ad supported game.  Let me know if you guys find any more networks worth adding to this post.  I know this space is growing by the day!

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For those of you who don’t know, the Digital Media Learning Competition is an annual competition started in 2007 funded by the government and other non-profit organizations (HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation) to award grants to help individuals and organizations come up with “the most novel uses of new media in support of learning.”

This year’s theme is “Reimagining Learning” and has two categories for entrants: 21st Century Learning Lab Designers and Game Changers.  You might be thinking we’d be entering our game, Q Racer, for the Game Changers category, but that isn’t the case.  Game Changers is partly sponsored by Sony and involves coming up with new ways to use their game, Little Big Planet, to encourage learning and sharing.  While it is an interesting category we are more interested on creating a new platform that combines fun learning and fun gaming.  That’s why we chose to enter the Learning Labs portion of the competition.  This is the official description for Learning Lab Designers:

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