It’s almost midnight and I put the last two changes into Fish Lake so Dennis can do a new build and Devon can test it in the morning. The page for learning more about fractions on a number line looked like this: Now it looks like this: Our old […]
AnnMaria De Mars
“I’m not Tom Cruise.” When a middle school math teacher said this, my initial response was, “No, duh.” He was irate, though, because this extremely qualified, knowledgable teacher had been told by his principal that he would not have any students failing in his class if he “made class more […]
Do what you love and never work a day in ...
Nothing over the past few years has changed my mind about “educational games”. Most of these are either bad games or bad education. I don’t – completely – blame the makers of those games, though. That’s like blaming television executives for all of the stupid programs on TV. If 13 million […]
The crazy economics of educational technology expectations
My brilliant niece, Samantha, has a term for it: yes-butter. Read to the end for why yes-butter is the death of so much new technology. I’m sure you’ve had yes-butter spread thickly on you as well. You know what I’m talking about – the people who, when they have a […]
Kid bad at math? Here’s your magic wand
I really do like teachers. You know I do. I used to be a teacher, my brother is a teacher and my daughter is a teacher – all at the middle school level. Currently, in our spare time of which we have none, my brother, sister and I all teach […]
Teachers need to quit hating on business
You would think as a company creating software for education, both in school and at home, that we would be discouraged by an article with the title “Why For-Profit Education Fails”. You would be wrong. In fact, I agree with pretty much all of the Atlantic article but I found […]
Why we won’t fail
Since we just had our Latino tech meet up, this seems like the perfect time to give a tech tip on getting those Spanish-language accent marks right in your HTML. Look closely at this image below. It’s part of what was in one of our pretests that assess our game. […]
Tech tip: accent marks for Spanish text
We appreciate everyone who reads our blogs, listens to our podcast and plays games. That doesn’t mean we are friends, though. So, let’s get to know each other a little better! I’ll tell you five things you probably don’t know about us you can add comments anything interesting about you. […]
Five things you probably don’t know about 7 Generation Games
Have you seen the sign carried by a 90-year-old woman at a civil rights event that says, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit?” I was feeling like that today when I had forwarded to me by people who, correctly, thought I would find interesting […]
Dancing on the way to the pencil sharpener
In my last post, I mentioned that follow-up was one of the keys to getting the most possible out of a conference. The South Dakota Indian Education Summit was no exception. I always try to go to some sessions on topics I know absolutely nothing about. If you know me […]
Art, literacy and the South Dakota Indian Education Summit
Conferences are expensive. Even if you aren’t at one with a five – or six – figure registration fee, you still are taking days away from work. Probably, you are flying to another state, staying at a hotel and eating in restaurants. Why on earth would you spend all of […]
Four ways to waste your time at a conference
Often, people have told us that we should integrate the educational content more tightly with the games. However, that’s prohibitively expensive. The idea that we would have all of our educational content for example spoken by 3D characters in the games, or act it out by, say, catching 125 fish, […]