Talk Town started out as a class assignment in the Master of Audiology degree at the University of Canterbury - where it received full marks and will be used for future teaching. Talk Town was supported by the UC Centre for Entrepreneurship, and won their business Bootcamp competition. Presentations on Talk Town were delivered at NZ Tech Week events, and Talk Town featured in UC print and media campaigns. Talk Town then went on to win first prize in the Entre Start-Up competition.

We ran workshops to gain the input of teachers, clinicians and Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing students at Ko Taku Reo and The Hearing House. Workshop participants provided valuable input which was incorporated into iterative prototypes. We also took our prototype game to the Deaf Children NZ Camp and gained great feedback from deaf kids and their siblings. It's been great to see the positive impact Talk Town has had on players.

We received funding from the National Foundation of the Deaf to illustrate our prototype. Talk Town won the inaugural Social Enterprise category at the Webstock BNZ Start-Up Alley. We also received funding from the Christchurch City Council to release our first full version of the game. Talk Town will soon be available on Google Play. We continue to keep deaf students' needs at the heart of everything we do. It's all go!

We want to make Talk Town available to as many deaf kids as possible. This means expanding to other countries, and exploring ways to make it cheaper for users to access. We also need to explore ways to make the content more accessible, and look forward to making a NZSL version in the near future. We aim to make a two-player version to support empathy and theory of mind development in deaf users and their hearing peers.

Zoe has returned to university to complete a PhD, improving and validating this resource at HITLabNZ.