Games That Make You Smarter

AnnMaria De Mars

Do you ever feel like you aren’t making progress in your efforts to teach students, improve schools, develop curriculum or whatever it is you are doing? I’ve been feeling like that for the last year, but then today I realized that we have more than doubled the number of […]

Better Education (Better Anything) Happens One Minute at a Time

February 2, 2019 in Educational Games / Educational Resources / Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Zombies — Think we couldn’t fit zombies into a video on math terms? Ha! You underestimate us! Sometimes students get a problem wrong not because they don’t know the answer but because they don’t understand the question. What is the difference between 210 and 11 ? Well, one is a three-digit number […]

Math Terms with Zombies: Ten-Minute Lesson

January 28, 2019 in 10 Minute Lesson / Educational Resources / Fifth Grade / Fourth Grade / Mathematics / problem-solving / Teachers by AnnMaria De Mars

Maybe you’ve heard that a stolen iPhone is nothing more than a brick. Stop and read this. It may save you whole lot of grief and panic. Perhaps you feel as if your data is safe. You have a password and it’s not 123456. You have find my iPhone. […]

No, a stolen iPhone isn’t a brick: How thieves access ...

January 27, 2019 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

spaghetti — Word Problems are Hard for Many Students. Here’s one way to make these easier I don’t care how old you are, word problems can confuse you. This is particularly true when you have a lot of extra information. That’s what the world is like, though. When you need to figure […]

Ten-minute lesson: Problem-solving tip for word problems – Start at ...

January 24, 2019 in 10 Minute Lesson / Division / Fourth Grade / Mathematics by AnnMaria De Mars

giraffe — If Janie had 3 avocados and Frank owns 2 giraffes, how many hippopotamuses does it take to make it rain for 6 days? Do word problems ever make you feel like this? Many students who have no problem with “What is 12 x 4?” get stuck when the question involves […]

Build a model: Ten minutes on problem-solving

January 23, 2019 in 10 Minute Lesson / Fourth Grade / Mathematics / multiplication / problem-solving by AnnMaria De Mars

Label the terms 512/2 =256 — Quick! Which one is the dividend and which is the divisor? Unless, you have learned, or taught, division fairly recently, I bet you had to to think about it for a while. Maybe you don’t even know. Here is a video to help learn the quotient from the remainder. This […]

Division Terms: What really trips students up in learning division

January 22, 2019 in 10 Minute Lesson / Division / Fourth Grade / Mathematics / Teachers by AnnMaria De Mars

This post could be labeled Part 1 of 873 but I don’t have that much time. Here is the back story … I decided to teach a more or less introductory statistics class this semester because we make educational games and I think it is important to be in the […]

OMG I Know Why Teachers Don’t Use New Technology

January 13, 2019 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

Excited children about to play our games — Did you miss me? So much has been going great lately – and to be honest semi-great but a lot of work – that I have barely had the chance to breathe, much less write . Here’s AnnMaria’s version of a Christmas letter. (Note to self: find out if Chileans […]

The tip of the iceberg of awesomeness: My company Christmas ...

January 12, 2019 in AnnMaria / blogposts / Education: Innovation and STEM / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

Yaima the llama says feliz año nuevo — Yes, I realize it’s more traditional to say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year but I really am incredibly thankful. Whether you work in education or on a startup you likely tend to end the year with your to-do list undone, fretting about that activity you didn’t rewrite or […]

Happy New Year and Thanksgiving

December 30, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

3d numbers — I knew that making educational software for Latino children in the U.S. and for children in Chile would need to be different. I just didn’t how or how much until I spent the last year working with schools here. How Spanish speakers used our bilingual software In the U.S. , […]

Latin American children vs children in Latin America: What I ...

December 11, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / rural education / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Me, Ronda, Federico and Alonso — Welcome back to the latest issue of the Startup Diaries: Santiago Edition. Accelerator staff often advise when pitching an investor to discuss the global market for their product because it is going to be significantly bigger than the U.S. market. I’ve always found that a little odd. For example, well […]

You Don’t Even Know What the Global Market Looks Like

December 6, 2018 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries / Uncategorized by AnnMaria De Mars

You may have heard about all of the schools that have 1 to 1 devices , Chromebooks, iPads or Windows computers. It’s a lie. I’m not saying that no schools have a device for every child. I’m sure some do. However, one thing the last four years has taught me […]

The Lie about Computers in Schools: When 1 to 1 ...

December 4, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars