AnnMaria De Mars

We are working on a new game, set on an American Indian reservation, Crossroads, and we have a female character named, Jessie and a male character named ? He is supposed to be from a tribe in the Great Plains and live on or near the reservation. He has a […]

Name this guy!

September 10, 2018 in AnnMaria / Cultural content / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

Atacama desert — How do you say it? I asked Maria Paz. Decepcionado, She answered . ‘Huh, I would have guessed that meant “deceptive”. So, it means “disappointed”. Well, that’s how I feel , “decpcionado”. I’ve been in Chile for 7 months and I don’t feel as if my life has changed much […]

Start-up Diaries: You can’t change overnight

September 4, 2018 in Uncategorized by AnnMaria De Mars

trail on top of a mountain — A lot of people say they are a workaholic but they actually work for half an hour, check Facebook for half an hour, work for another half-hour, fix themselves a snack, and so on. Their 12- 14 hour work day is more like a 6 or 7 hours of actual […]

Testing a theory that you don’t have to die at ...

August 18, 2018 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

words activities from Making Camp Premium — What do grammar fixes in our games and not swearing at your students have in common? Now, you, Ms. or Mr. 5th Grade Teacher, have probably never even considered telling Emma or Devon or D’emery that you are going to skin them alive and send the hides home to their […]

Because Details Matter: 100 little tweaks and not swearing at ...

August 16, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

road outside of Tomé — You’d certainly hope after seven months in Chile I would have learned something, right? In fact, I think I’ve gained both professionally and personally. Life is lived forwards but understood backwards. For example, I never knew when I was training for the world championships that it would prepare me for […]

What did I learn in Chile?

August 8, 2018 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Here’s the vicious circle, few people like to do things they do very poorly, but it takes practice to get good which they don’t want to do because they are bad at math/ English/ violin/ whatever. It’s amazing that anyone learns anything, isn’t it? We can learn a lot about […]

Helping kids like school: There’s an app for that

August 5, 2018 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Educational Resources by AnnMaria De Mars

Teaching English isn’t a piece of cake

August 1, 2018 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

snow on mountains behind the skyscrapers in Santiago, Chile — If you are planning on coming to Chile for more than a week and you are going somewhere besides the Intercontinental Hotel and the U.S. Embassy, odds are, you’ll be meeting and working with some Chileans. If you had been paying attention to this blog, you would be studying Spanish […]

Start-up Diaries, Santiago Edition> Chileans are Chill

July 28, 2018 in Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Guinea pig — I speak at conferences around the country, have a hundred meetings a year with clients, teachers, students and investors, so when I say that I’m an introvert, people often look at me skeptically. The fact is that I was always very much of a loner when I was younger. Right […]

Startup Life as an Introvert or Yes, I’d Love to ...

July 27, 2018 in Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

No one is searching for a walking robot on teachers pay teachers — Did you know that 7 Generation Games offers a game design curriculum? If your school licenses our games, you can get it for free, all you need to do is ask. If you talk to Maria or me, you probably don’t even need to ask because we can’t wait to […]

Get Your Kids into STEM Through Game Design

July 19, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Game Design / Remote Education tagged Game Design / learning at home / STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

There’s a comic where the boss tells an engineer to “give the customers what they want” and the engineer says, “They want better products, for free.” The boss promptly scraps that give-the-customers-what-they-want nonsense. Almost from the first moment we produced Spirit Lake and Fish Lake people have been asking us, […]