Games That Make You Smarter

AnnMaria De Mars

Julia doing a science experiment — You know that saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” Well, my week has been something like that. I was showing our Spirit Lake demo at a school and realized that it HAD NOT BEEN UPDATED IN THREE YEARS !! The demo was supposed to look like this: … […]

Making Software Design from Lemons (or something like that)

October 9, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / New earth / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Jennifer looking sadly at the laptop — Introverts, unite! Often, whether it is interviewing guests on the More Than Ordinary podcast or talking to teachers in general, I ask how they accommodate students who are more introverted and don’t want to work in groups. Inevitably, I get the answer, “People HAVE to work in groups in their […]

How Do I Handle Introverted Students?

October 8, 2017 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

Making Camp bilingual — I’ll give it to you in one sentence. History class was boring. With two exceptions, (thank you, Mr. MacPhail and Dr. Perkoff), from kindergarten through graduate school, all of my history courses were nothing but names and dates. This guy was king on this day and this war ended on […]

The Reason I Hated History Class (& what I did ...

October 4, 2017 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

I have read a lot of stories about Windows 10S , the new operating system from Microsoft that is supposed to be safe, secure and speedy (what does the S stand for, anyway?). I asked Gonzalo to install it on one of the office Windows laptops because Fish Lake and […]

Windows 10S Passes the Test

October 3, 2017 in Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

View of lake from top of a hill — Ten days, nine cities, three states If you’re one of the 2,000+ email messages in my inbox, sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. If you’re one of the 18 voicemail messages I got yesterday asking, “Where have you been?” Well … It’s been a busy 10 days. Los Angeles […]

Entrepreneurship – not for faint of heart: 10 days, 9 ...

September 30, 2017 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

When people at cocktail parties ask what I do for a living I often tell them I teach statistics to adults who don’t want to learn statistics and make math games for kids who don’t want to learn math. (Yes, I get invited to cocktail parties. I have friends!) Generally, the […]

Thoughts on Teaching: 100 word challenge for math and statistics

September 15, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Math by AnnMaria De Mars

Games we made — If you didn’t know, now you know, the South Dakota Indian Education Summit is in Pierre, South Dakota (what state were you expecting?) September 24-26 , 2017. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of smaller, education conferences. There are four general reasons why these are a good use […]

Six reasons to go to the South Dakota Indian Education ...

September 14, 2017 in AnnMaria / Cultural content / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

jungle scene — Thanks to our wonderful Kickstarter backers, I am in the middle of adding an Easter egg to Aztech Games. It’s a simple “find the hidden objects” type of game where you have a minute to find everything. Here is the problem: I want the images to be layered. As you […]

Tech Tip: Clicking through a layer

September 12, 2017 in Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

bike — Where do you get your ideas? This has to be one of the most common questions I get about game development and it’s interesting because I think design ideas are EVERYWHERE! Bad design gives me ideas how not to make things. Good design (more about that next post) gives me […]

Design ideas are everywhere: part 1

September 12, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

road in North Dakota — Have you ever tried a bike-sharing app? Maybe if you live out in the country, it’s not a thing, but here in Santa Monica, you can’t go far without seeing the lime green bicycles from our local bike sharing company. The idea is simple. Get an app on your phone, […]

What bike-sharing can teach you about educational technology

September 11, 2017 in AnnMaria / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

juice — I read this week that Juicero is going out of business. If you are not one of the cool kids you might not be aware that this is the company that made a $700 juicer, later reduced to the bargain price of $400. In this case, you might be interested […]

Seriously, is this what you want to do with your ...

September 5, 2017 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

pineapple — We had Dean Dauphinais, Jr. on the More Than Ordinary podcast this week talking about the charity he co-founded, All Star Vets. One of his motivations he mentioned was that veterans are often people who entered the service at a young age, as teenagers, and they were “part of a […]

Why my tribe needs you and a virtual pineapple

September 3, 2017 in AnnMaria / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars