After a day full of buzzing and beeping, tokens and tickets, the arcade is finally closing for the night. The last employee flips the switch on the arcade machines, and a moment after the click of the locking door, something stirs in the shadows. A small silhouette peeks its head out, followed by another and another.

Meet the Gashlings! The tiny workers inside the arcade machines of GASHA GO! World that ensure the machines are all ready for the busy day ahead. Gashlings work together and use their creativity, determination, and problem-solving skills to keep everything running smoothly in the arcade.

BUBBLE BUILD is a skill-building math game for children 4-8 that is aligned to the Georgia Standards of Excellence for mathematics. The game focuses on developing children’s number sense which is a sense of what numbers mean and their relationship to one another. Research* shows that children who have a well-developed number sense are able to succeed in early math (and beyond), while children who do not are at much greater risk of falling increasingly further behind.

CLAW CONTROL is a problem-solving game for children ages 4-8 that is aligned to the Georgia Standards of Excellence for computer science (CS). To help the Gashlings make stuffed animals to fill the claw machine, CLAW CONTROL encourages kids to break complex problems into smaller parts, known in the CS world as decomposition.

Teachers can use BUBBLE BUILD and CLAW CONTROL during classroom instruction as a center activity or for individual students who need additional support. Families can use the game to build skills at home. The games were developed through a collaboration between GPB Education and FableVision Studios. Teachers and subject matter experts were consulted throughout the development process.

The name GASHA GO! World comes from the terms gashapon (ガシャポン) or gachapon (ガチャポン) which refer to a variety of vending machine-dispensed capsule toys popular in Japan and elsewhere. "Gashapon" is a Japanese onomatopoeia composed of two sounds: "gasha" (or "gacha") for the sound of a crank on a toy vending machine, and "pon" for the sound of the toy capsule dropping into the receptacle.

Gasha GO characters

*Jordan, N. C., Glutting, J., & Ramineni, C. (2010). The Importance of Number Sense to Mathematics Achievement in First and Third Grades. Learning and Individual Differences, 20(2), 82–88. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2009.07.004