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Osmo Teaches Entrepreneurship With iPads And Pizza

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Osmo Pizza Co. is a new iPad game that combines cooking and entrepreneur play with interactive ingredient and money tokens.

What strikes you first about the new game is the level of characterisation on show here. We saw some of this with Osmo's Coding and Monster games but in Pizza Co' there a whole menagerie of animal characters coming to order pizza.

The game works on two levels. There's a steady stream of customers who each have different topping requests. These are delivered by placing different ingredient tokens on the round Pizza board in front of the iPad. Once it's complete you simply slide it to the right to put it in the over.

The second play pattern then takes over with children having to identify how much cash they've been given by each customer and then placing the coin and note tokens on the flips side of the pizza to return the right amount of change. It's a simple mechanic but one that works well.

Pizza Co. sells for $39 on its own or with the Commerce Kit, which includes the Osmo game system Base and Mirror, Pizza Co. and other apps Newton and Masterpiece, for $59.

I spoke to Pramod Sharma, CEO of Osmo, and asked him whether he'd considered combining the tech with a well know brand (as with Ingress and Pokemon Go!). "We're always looking into opportunities into use an existing IP to scale out products. But focus for this year has been to define what are the core experiences on our platform. Proving that children love our experiences. At some point we will use external IP to scale that. But this year is about innovating on the interaction itself."

Certainly, the expanding library of Osmo games that use the red lozenge to cast the gaze of the iPad camera down to the table, covers a lot of different interactions with the technology. Pizza Co brings some new skills to bear.

Entrepreneurial activities aim to teach children confidence, resilience, creativity, initiative and empathy. “I wish I had something like Pizza Co. when I was a kid,” said Pramod Sharma, CEO and Co-founder of Osmo. “Kids actually have a leg up on a lot of entrepreneurs - they are by nature curious and resilient. Who knows, this could spark an entrepreneurial drive that creates the next Jessica Alba or Bill Gates in your little one.”

Osmo Pizza Co. is available at playosmo.com and Amazon.

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