PERTH ‘edutainment’ company Lizard Edutainment, producer of a suite of learning software under the banner Fun-Ed, has secured a $1 million deal for distribution of its games to schools in the Czech and Slovak republics.
The news comes after the company gained approval from the British Government for its games to be made available for sale to schools in Britain.
Fun-Ed also has approval to sell its game, Evacu-8, using the Nintendo game console brand.
Lizard Edutainment director Jean du Buisson said the recent deal in the Czech and Slovak republics was the result of an agreement with Czech company BSP Multimedia for the translation and distribution of all of its Fun-Ed products.
The deal was struck after the company won a 2003 Australian IT Innovation award, the prize for which was a business development trip to the Czech Republic, partly funded by Austrade.
Mr du Buisson said BSP Multimedia was impressed with Lizard Edutainment’s products and the ease of language conversion.
“Localising [translating] games can be quite difficult and cost prohibitive because of the way software is developed,” Mr du Buisson said.
“But with our software, all of the images and other parts are external to the code so they just translate the images and we reassemble it. It’s much easier this way because you don’t have to break down code. If you do that you have to hire programmers to do it.”
Fun-Ed is a range of more than 30 games designed specifically for grade three and four mathematics students.
Its school version includes monitoring of student performance.
Mr du Buisson said Lizard Edutainment was poised for further growth due to a lack of quality PC-based learning products worldwide.
“What we found was that a lot of edutainment games are recycled old ones that are packaged up for new technology,” he said.
“The kids find them dull and boring. They’ve got Sony playstations and they like those games.
“Kids are going into the consoles and won’t go to the PC unless it can provide the same entertainment of a console, so that’s what’s lacking in many PC products.”
Mr du Buisson said he was keen to develop the UK market.
“You can’t distribute in the schools there until you get accepted by the government, but we’ve now been accepted so the schools can buy it online,” he said.
“We have appointed a retailer and they will work on developing that market.”
Lizard Edutainment was also likely explore the Nintendo distribution, Mr du Buisson told WA Business News.
But the fragmented market in Western Australia had made distribution to schools in this State a difficult proposition, he said, and it was easier to strike deals offshore.
