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.

• 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!

You can find more about the game on our Q Racer game page. Or you can just check out Q Racer on iTunes…and hopefully open up your hearts and wallets and purchase the game

Here’s the trailer video for it. Our goal as we set out in the beginning is to help you make the process of learning fun. Give it a try and let us know how we did. We love both positive and critical feedback.

It’s really funny to see how much it’s changed from one of our early prototypes.

1. Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader 2010

What you learn:

General trivia knowledge

Description:

“Based on the hit show, ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A 5TH GRADER?™ 2010 features all the charm, humor and deceptively difficult questions that make the television show a household name. In the game, players are asked a series of up to eleven questions ranging from subjects like U.S. history, math or social studies. Perform well, and you can work you way to the $1 million question. Choke and you’ll be forced to utter the unenviable phrase “I am not smarter than a 5th grader.”

2. iTextSpeed

What you learn:

How to type faster on an iPhone/iPod Touch

Developer’s Description:

Used by the fastest iPhone texters in the world to practice and measure speed. It helps you improve your texting speed, and lets you share your results with friends. This can be played in 15, 30, 60, and 120 second games, and can be played in both Portrait and Landscape orientations.

3. Sporcle

What you learn:

General trivia knowledge

Developer’s Description:

Sporcle is the fun and challenging way to strain your brain, study for that final, or learn just about anything. Choose from hundreds of quizzes in sports, geography, music, science and more. There will be more games and more features coming in subsequent updates!

4. The Oregon Trail

What you learn:

Strategy/life skills, how to survie a long journey

Developer’s Description:

Westward, Ho! Your favorite pioneering adventure game is back and takes you to an exciting, historical side-scrolling adventure entirely rethought to fit the Touch experience of your iPhone / iPod touch.

5. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? 2010

What you learn:

General trivia knowledge

Developer’s Description:

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire 2010 challenges players to correctly answer 15 questions of increasing difficulty with the help of four lifelines – Ask the Audience, Phone a Friend, Double Dip and Ask the Expert. Just like on TV, players must answer before the game clock runs out, and any time remaining on the clock is banked for the million-dollar question.

6. Lemonade Stand

What you learn:

How to run a successful business

Developer’s Description:

Lemonade Stand is a simple tycoon style game. You are in charge of running your own stand where you juggle pricing, recipe, advertising, and amount of lemonade to make each day. You have 30 days to see how much money you can make, but keep an eye on the weather forecast – a thunderstorm blowing in could ruin an entire day but a heat wave could send your sales soaring!

7. Jeopardy

What you learn:

Genearl trivia knowledge and the secret to Alex Trebek’s long life (just kidding)

Developer’s Description:

This…is…JEOPARDY! One of the most successful mobile games in history is now officially available and optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch! Experience the fast-paced fun of the television show by answering clues, wagering on daily doubles or risking it all in Final Jeopardy!

8. Braineous: Challenge Your Brain

What you learn:

Increasing math and mental processing skills

Developer’s Description:

You are a contestant on a game show. Can you assemble puzzles, solve math problems under pressure? Braineous includes 10 games to stimulate your neurons, but the challenge doesn’t stop there. Think you’re good? Submit your score to the Try This Game Network and compare yourself with the rest of the world to find out how smart you REALLY are.

9. TextTwist 2

What you learn:

Spelling and improving your verbal skills

Developer’s Description:

Shuffle the letters and form words in this fun game for the entire family. Try your skills in five challenging game modes. Play the original Timed and Untimed modes or take it to the next level with three other exciting modes: Letter Mania, Lightning, and Daily Word.

10. QRANK

What you learn:

General trivia knowledge

Developer’s Description:

The goal of QRANK is to choose 15 of the 20 possible questions and answer them quickly and accurately to beat your friends and earn achievements. There are seven question categories, as well as hidden bonuses, so choose your tiles carefully. Use the power-ups to help you pick wisely.

11. Sorter

What you learn:

Color management and general reflex skills

Developer’s Description:

Get ready to sort! Test your reflexes by sorting robotic time bombs into matching color bins. The more you sort the faster it gets. Sort the ticking bombs before time runs out. Compete against sorters all over the world for high scores. Test your skills in this incredibly addictive, fast-paced, arcade-action game.

12. Quaso

What you learn:

Math skills

Developer’s Description:

Quaso is the new mathematical puzzle game by John Enock, brought to the iPhone by Adduce Studios. It is similar to a crossword but with numbers. Unlike other puzzles, it is not computer generated. Each game is individually crafted by John.

13. Wiki Hunt

What you learn:

General trivia knowledge

Developer’s Description:

Have you ever played the Wikipedia game? If not, it’s simple: go to Wikipedia. Decided what article you want to find. Then push “Random Article.” Then, use as few clicks as possible to get to the target article. Usually, in real life this is a “race” against friends who are watching over your shoulder. The Wiki Hunt app, however, takes this game and turns it into a solo contest to get from Point A to Point B in six clicks or less.

14. Blokus

What you learn:

Strategy and spacial reasoning

Developer’s Description:

The new award-winning hit board game arrives on the App Store! Play with your friends in local or online Multiplayer mode in one of the 4 game variations! Rules are simple! The winning strategy: Block your opponents so they cannot add any more blocks on the board! Blokus™ is a strategy game that will captivate you and get into your mind.

Bookworm

What you learn:

Spelling and improving your verbal skills

Developer’s Description:

Have an appetite for words? Then join Lex the Bookworm in the hit word-puzzle game created by PopCap, makers of the best casual games this side of Jupiter! Link letter tiles left, right, up and down to build words to keep Lex sated and smiling. The bigger the word, the better the bonus. But watch out for burning letters — they could spell disaster for you and Lex!

The actual Pimsleur learning system only comprises a set of audio cd’s.  There are no workbooks or flashcards to memorize.  They promise that you can learn a language by simply listening to their audio cd’s.   I’ve tried it before and it’s not bad.  At first it might seem a little repetitive, but you actually do remember stuff after listening it (I tried the Vietnamese and to this day I still remember the phrase “Ba go huoh do ang hum”…which I’m sure I’ve butchered in spelling…it means something like “Excuse me old lady”).

Anway, this is something Randy came across and sent to the rest of us.  An ad he got via email.

We loved the bold slogan, “Learn any language in 10 days! Just sit back and listen”

Maybe if you are really smart you could pull off learning a language in 10 days, but I know for sure I didn’t learn Vietnamese in 10 days (actually I never learned it at all).  But we’d like the confidence and inspirational tone of the message.  So in similar fashion Randy suggested our own bold slogan for Q Racer…

That’s right, “Learn anything in 2 minutes!” just by sitting back and playing our game Q Racer.  Why anything?  Well, we allow you to choose different content lists to learn so it could be anything from Spanish vocab to celebrity spouses.  Why 2 minutes? Right now we’ve set our race time to 2 minutes…so in those 2 minutes you will have learned everything!  OK, so maybe not.

All joking aside.  We are similar to Pimsleur.  Actually Pimsleur was one of the initial inspirations for Q Racer.  We wanted to create a game that would help us learn stuff effortlessly and more importantly while having fun.  We’ve been spending a lot of time tweaking and improving the engine to make sure this is actually the case (which is also partly the reason Q Racer has been delayed).  So anyway…we can’t wait to release the game and empower people to learn anything in 2 minutes!

Oh yea, don’t worry, it won’t be $9.99…but there will be free shipping!

In terms of percentage of games in the App Store educational games doesn’t fare too poorly.  Educational games make up 7% of the total games in the App Store which puts it in the 6th out of 19 game sub categories.  The most by far is Puzzle games at 15% and the least is Racing and Dice games at 1%.

Q Racer we would classify as educational , but you could also call maybe classify it as racing and maybe trivia as well.  So in terms of competitors this suggests that there won’t be as many similar game offerings (hopefully being unique in a good way pays off for us) as ours.

Next thing worth looking at in the Distimo report (by the way which you can download here) is the average price of games organized by category.  Here Educational games command a whopping average price of $1.57 per game.  Educational games rank 13 of out the 19 games in terms of price.  This pales in comparison to top dog, Role Playing games, which gets a much healthier $7.95 per game.  The worst, or cheapest category of games are Kid’s games with a measly $1.29 per game. I guess parents aren’t as willing to spend top dollar on games for their kids.

It’s interesting looking at this pricing information.  Pricing games sometimes is more art than science, but with this data we might be able to get a good estimated price.  I figure since Q Racer is a mix of Educational, Racing, and Trivia, I can just take the average of those categories’ prices and bam! That will give us the price we should charge for our game.  According to this “strategy” the market price for our game should be…$1.91!  Or since Apple is against prices that don’t end in 99 cents we’ll just make it an even $1.99.  Man, this pricing thing is easy…

…however just because you can charge a lot for a game doesn’t necessarily mean you make a lot of money from it.  It all comes down to volume.  This is where Distimo gives us one last gem of information, the Most Grossing Game Categories based on percentage of game titles in the top overall games rankings.

Here Educational games doesn’t do so well at having a 2% share of games in the Top Overall Games ranking.  Action, Adventure, and Arcade definitely have a commanding lead over every other category.  Does that mean we should just give up on Q Racer and make a super fun filled action adventure / arcade game?  No, that just means there’s lot of room for improvement!  Plus if everyone knows how popular those other category games it just means more competition…which means making it harder for your game to get noticed.  And like prevailing iPhone success wisdom dictates…getting noticed translates into results.

Anyway, the report is definitely worth taking a look at if you are interested in this stuff.  Can any of you guys (either developers or game buyers) confirm that the results of this report are accurate from what you’ve seen?

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).

While these games look horribly unfun, they do get points in my book for trying to make a game out of diabetes and experimental surgery.  Great on novelty, poor on execution.

If you didn’t check out the video check out these wonderful in game screens.  Look at all the fun you are missing out on!

Captain Novolin

Premise:  You play as Captain Novolin, a super hero who has diabetes.  Aliens have invaded the planet and turned themselves into junk food.  You have to avoid eating them and manage your sugar intake on your quest to save the mayor to some crappy town.

Love being lectured by doctors?  You’ll love Captain Novolin

Just another day in neighborhood…is it lunch time?

Apparently evil aliens and diabetes have some kind of connection

Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon

Premise:  You are brilliant experimental surgeon Rex Ronan.   You shrink down to microscopic size to enter the body of Jake Westboro, an executive at a tobacco company who has developed lung cancer,  whom only you can save.

Bet you can’t wait to “Start Game,” can you?

Jake, didn’t you know that smoking is bad for you??

Cleaning teeth is not just for dentists

Ad Network Companies:

As the iPhone app space gets hotter and hotter the number of ad networks seems to increase.  These are the networks that seem to be popular or well known in the mobile ad space.

• Greystripe/Tribal Fusion
• Admob (now owned by the Google)
• Jumptap
• Pinch Media/Pinch Advertising
• Videoegg
• Adwhirl
• Tap Joy
• Mobclix

Articles Worth Reading:

• How Indie Developer Can Create Multiple Hit iPhone Games
• Backflip on 11 million downloads, $1 million sales, and the power of in-app advertising
• Greystripe Ups the Ante in the iPhone Ad Network Wars
• Should an iPhone Add Developer Charge or Run Ads
• Policies and Tips for admob

Key Advertising Terms:

Impressions:

The number of times a banner ad was requested and presumably seen by users. It is often hard to obtain an accurate impression count as they can be undercounted due to issues relating to cache or overcounted due to requests that were not completed. (http://www.adglossary.com/index.php?term=66)

eCPM:

Effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. Essentially, effective CPM represents your estimated earnings for every 1000 impressions you receive.

Effective CPM doesn’t represent how much you have actually earned — rather, it’s calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page impressions, then multiplying by 1000. For example, if you earned an estimated $0.15 from 25 page impressions, then your page eCPM would equal ($0.15 / 25) * 1000, or $6.00. If you earned an estimated $180 from 45,000 ad impressions, your ad eCPM would equal ($180 / 45,000) * 1000, or $4.00.

If that still confuses you read this article.

Difference between CPC and CPM Ads:

I can’t do this one justice so if you’re interested in the difference read this excellent article by Blogger Cash.

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:

Winners will receive awards for learning environments and digital media-based experiences that allow young people to grapple with social challenges through activities based on the social nature, contexts, and ideas of science, technology, engineering and math. Digital media of any type (social networks, games, virtual worlds, mobile devices or others) may be used. Proposals are also encouraged for curricula or other experiences that link or connect to any game. Learning labs may be designed around new games or expand the potential of open source or commercial games.

Those selected as finalists in this category will be awarded with a grant ranging from 30,000 to 200,000 (depending on how much you specify you need).  To be considered for the competition entrants had to submit a project 300 word description.  With all this in mind we took our concept of Q Racer and expanded it and entered the competition with what we call “QRWB: Q Racer World Battle.”  You can read our official entry which has been publicly posted on the competition website or read it below:

Educational video games have enormous potential to reach students outside the classroom. The problem is students seldom play these games. However, imagine an educational game so fun and addictive that students actually want to play it. Quiz Racer World Battle (QRWB) is such a game. A game where students have fun learning by competing, creating, and sharing with others around the world.

QRWB is a racing game playable on Facebook or iPhone. Students race against friends, teachers, parents, and other players. As a player races, different questions are presented. By selecting correct answers, avoiding wrong answers, and using in-game items and powers they progress towards the finish line. Players select from question lists like World Country Capitals, Spanish Food Vocabulary, or 20th Century Inventors. Lists are multimedia: allowing text, audio, or images. Players could match audio clips of Spanish words to their English translations or match pictures of inventions to their inventors. The game’s learning engine monitors a player’s performance and optimizes the order, frequency, and timing of questions to best ensure learning. The result is a customized learning experience that adapts and continually challenges a player’s knowledge level.

Racing is not the only part of QRWB. Players can create, share, and collaborate on question lists. List topics can be diverse; students can build lists around their personal interests, teachers can build around their lesson plans, and organizations can build around their causes. Players are incentivized to engage with QRWB through the earning of virtual goods, challenges from friends, real-time multiplayer competition, and periodic tournaments.

QRWB mission is two fold: create a fun experience and teach something valuable. By accomplishing this Quiz Racer World Battle is a game that could be played in the classroom, but more importantly, would be played outside the classroom.”

We basically took our concept of Quiz Racer and expanded it by allowing people to play it on Facebook and other social networking platforms.  We’ll be judged on the following criteria:

• Encourage opportunities for critical feedback, collaboration and sharing of work and learning with an audience of peers?
• Enable the sharing of data, information, or knowledge?
• Invite social engagement and interaction in support of learning?
• Provide low barriers to production and distribution, supporting, making, doing and/or tinkering?
• Create or use existing platforms for ongoing and immediate feedback?
• Establish or use channels for distribution?
• Improve skills or knowledge in an area of a defining challenge?
• Trigger continued engagement across different media forms and/or contexts (i.e., schools, libraries, museums, after-school learning environments, home, mobile or virtual etc)?
• Engage young people in creating the learning experiences for others?
• Define the role of mentors, guides, and other practitioners?
• Challenge traditional notions of authority and expertise?
• Advance dispositions and habits of mind that are nurtured by an understanding of science, technology, engineering and math?

What do you guys think?  From our description do you think we address these points?

What are our chances of winning?  Last year 19 projects were selected as finalists and awarded grants out of a field of over 700 entries.  This year in the Learning Lab’s category alone there are 728 entrants. Combined with the Game Changer’s category the total number of entries is at 795.  Right off the bat the probability of use being selected as a finalist is 2.4%.  Not the greatest odds, but still in the realm of possibility.

What’s next for us?  We have to re-submit our application again and then it will be judged by their expert panel.  From there if we score high enough we’ll be invited to upload a 3 minute machinima-style video demo and a budget narrative.  After that then they’ll decide who the finalists are.  So when you think about it the whole competition boils down to our 300 word description, 3 minute video, and budget narrative.  Pretty crazy stuff.  We’re excited though.  If you guys have any feedback feel free to post comments here are on the entry itself.  Wish us luck!