GOLDENER SPATZ for Kitty Q: Game app on quantum physics wins at german children's media festival

Overview

The game app "Kitty Q – A Quantum Adventure" has convinced the children's jury at the German Children's Media Festival Goldener Spatz and won first prize in the DIGITAL competition. The prestigious award was presented this afternoon in Erfurt to Prof. Ralph Claessen, spokesperson of the Würzburg branch of the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat – Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter, and the app designer Philipp Stollenmayer. The mobile game around the cute, half-dead Kitty Q and Anna, the great-granddaughter of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, was developed under the auspices of the Cluster of Excellence of the Würzburg and Dresden universities and playfully inspires children and young people aged eleven and above to discover quantum physics. Since October 2021, the ad-free mobile game has been available free of charge in German and English in the App and Play Stores. To date, it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times worldwide.

The DIGITAL children's jury particularly liked the game app Kitty Q "because it is a funny, well-told yet tricky puzzle game," according to the laudation. "The beautiful story as well as the creative design and the fun puzzles telling something about quantum physics make the game so unique."

"We are immensely proud and happy to have received the GOLDENER SPATZ DIGITAL from a children's jury. This indicates to us that the intensive work has paid off. We have broken completely new ground with this. Normally, we juggle numbers and formulas or design materials in the lab. Here, however, the aim was to make the crazy world of quantum physics tangible for children. That's why we also learned a lot while working on Kitty Q. It's not easy, after all, to tell exciting stories that fascinate children! We are very happy that Philipp has embarked on this adventure and mastered the challenge so brilliantly! We will remember our lively discussions about cold chips, entanglements, donuts and Schrödinger's cat for a long time to come," Claessen emphasizes.

The playful approach has a serious background: The mobile game is intended to bring especially girls closer to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in a light-hearted way. Physics is a discipline with a particularly low proportion of women, after all. The game app focuses on more than 20 exciting puzzles based on scientific facts from quantum physics. Those who want to learn what's behind the puzzles can access background information from the Kittypedia, which is presented in an easy, accessible way. The real great-granddaughter and grandson of Erwin Schrödinger, Anna Braunizer and her father Leonhard, acted as patrons of Kitty Q. The German Research Foundation (DFG) funded the mobile game project with €100,000 as part of the International Research Marketing Ideas Competition.

"I am very happy about the GOLDENER SPATZ because this award is very special: the children themselves decided what they wanted to award. This shows us that we are attracting the interest of our target group with this not particularly easy topic," comments the app designer Stollenmayer. With Kitty Q, he designed his first commissioned game for the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat. Otherwise, he develops his games on his own and has already won all the major prizes in game design – most recently the Apple Design Award 2020.

More on Kitty Q

Take a look at selected highlights from Kitty Q's past here: https://www.ctqmat.de/en/news/2021-12-21-quantum-physics-explained-simply-award-winning-game-app-kitty-q-launches-quantube-series-with-explainer-videos, and here: https://www.ctqmat.de/en/news/2022-03-31-great-honor-for-kitty-q-the-game-app-wins-spanish-game-award-is-nominated-for-important-german-media-awards