Games That Make You Smarter

AnnMaria De Mars

new math activities page with graphics instead of links — When we started 7 Generation Games, we made some effort to interest angel investors. We had a few meetings with people who either: Told us flat out they didn’t think our company had commercial potential, including one who said, and I quote, “No one is interested in Indians” and another, […]

Not Getting Early Investor Money Was the Best Thing That ...

June 8, 2015 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

No one is ever going to give me $3 million in seed money just because I have an idea. I am not white enough, young enough, male enough and not only did I not drop out of an Ivy League school, I actually stuck around the University of California (a […]

When Disadvantages Are a Blessing

June 2, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from May 14, 2013,“Four Things Students Should Have Learned in School but Didn’t” that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. Here are four more of Dr. De Mars 55 things I have learned […]

Throwback Thursday: Four Things Students Should Have Learned in School ...

May 28, 2015 in AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday tagged coding / don't be a pain / learn how to code / mean what you say / say what you mean by AnnMaria De Mars

sausage — We’re almost done adding the polish to Spirit Lake. That’s polish, as in making all shiny and perfect, “polish your car”, not “Polish” as in sausage. The first change you’ll see from earlier versions is that the introductory 2-D hunting scene is replaced by a really short 3-D game. As […]

Spirit Lake Polish

May 27, 2015 in Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

background — We left off last time having created a form, written HTML and CSS, initializing the variables and selecting two random integers within a range we specified. Our next step is to put those numbers into a problem. That function is shown below. // CREATING A PROBLEM function getProb() { $('#mathform').show(); […]

Making a mini-game: Step 3 Getting the problem

May 26, 2015 in AnnMaria / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

form for math problem — Note: This is a step-by-step example of how to go about creating a mini-game. In this example, you get an animated pet dog. For every multiplication problem you solve, you and your dog get to do more activities. To see the first post in the series, Game Design, click here. […]

Making a Mini-Game Step 2: Setting it up

May 24, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from May 23, 2013,“Schoolchildren questions for statisticians” that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. It must be that time of year because I was asked to speak at two different schools in downtown […]

Throwback Thursday: Schoolchildren questions for statisticians

May 21, 2015 in AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday / Women in Tech tagged career day / Math / statistician / statistics by AnnMaria De Mars

Invisible barriers - zoomed out view — Whenever I get irritated by a company’s failure to consider it’s customers, I try to take a lesson from it. For example, I can’t stand software that nags you to download an update every freaking day. Seriously, is your product so bad that I really need to stop what I’m […]

Little Things Add Up

May 19, 2015 in Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

2 dogs and a play more button — It’s well-known around here at 7 Generation Games that the first 10-20% of a project is going to take you 40% of the time. Progress is slow while you figure out how to do some task, but once you have that code written, you can reuse it many places. Here […]

Step by Step Guide to Making a Mini-Game: Step 1 ...

May 15, 2015 in AnnMaria / Dog food / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from May 25, 2013,“Don’t Wait Until You’re Perfect” that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. I’m not perfect. God am I ever not perfect. I’ve been working on the Spirit Lake Game […]

Throwback Thursday: Don’t Wait Until You’re Perfect

May 14, 2015 in AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday / Women in Tech tagged being perfect / perfection / Spirit Lake by AnnMaria De Mars

A colleague of mine had this warning sign in her office of the dangers of trying to do too many projects at once: Jugglers don’t get paid very well and sometimes balls hit them in the head. Currently, we have two games on the market and are determined that VERY […]

Jugglers get hit in the head: Lessons for Forgotten Trail

May 13, 2015 in 7GenGames by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from May 16, 2011,“What I learned about statistics from martial arts” that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. I’m doing a workshop at the San Diego SAS users group meeting on Wednesday […]

Throwback Thursday: What I learned about statistics from martial arts

May 7, 2015 in AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday / Women in Tech tagged martial arts / programming / SAS / statistics by AnnMaria De Mars