Games That Make You Smarter

AnnMaria De Mars

bass (the fish) — For months we have been working on improvements to our next game, Fish Lake. Day after day, it was like piling up pebbles, fixing this line of code, brushing up that graphic. As usual, the first version had its share of glitches. It seemed like progress was going really […]

Fish Lake Rocks

October 10, 2014 in AnnMaria / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from April 16, 2014 on The Benefits of Being Uncool that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. Tom Peters has written quite a bit about the huge market opportunities in providing goods and […]

Throwback Thursday: The Benefits of Being Uncool

October 9, 2014 in AnnMaria tagged computer games / EdTech / education by AnnMaria De Mars

teachers — One basic principle we adopted early at 7 Generation Games is that teachers know what they need in their classrooms better than we do. We listen when teachers say something like, In the school where I work, “learned helplessness” is a huge problem. Kids don’t even try to read the […]

A game to teach a game

October 7, 2014 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

family reading — Today is one of my house-keeping days on the game. In the digital equivalent of dusting, I look over each page, fix any spelling or grammatical errors that may have gone uncaught, adjust margins to make the math problems more readable and other general appearance tasks to improve the instructional […]

To read it to me or not to read it ...

October 5, 2014 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from October 21, 2013 on why girls don’t like Math that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. Having taught math myself for the past 30 years, and with a brother […]

Throwback Thursday: Wonder why girls don’t like math? Look at ...

October 2, 2014 in AnnMaria / Math by AnnMaria De Mars

7GenBanner — While one aspect of my internship here at 7GenerationGames is to test our games (Spirit Lake and Fish Lake), I am also responsible for compiling teacher resources for our new iPad game currently in development. Essentially, I help the 7GenerationGames team come up with additional math exercises when students need […]

Teacher Resource: Bar Graphs in the iPad Game

October 1, 2014 in 7GenGames tagged 7GenerationGames / blog / Intern / Internship / Math by AnnMaria De Mars

scream — While I know that our marketing staff shudders every time I give a public speech or write a blog post, I just can’t help feeling the world could be a tiny bit better off with more honesty and less “we’re in a hockey stick pattern and by next year we’ll […]

4 Types of People Who Should Leave Start-ups Alone

September 30, 2014 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from May 29, 2014 on “The Rest of The Story… Lessons From the Red Queen’s Race” that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. Since we just launched our brand new 7 Generation […]

Throwback Thursday: It’s not enough just to do whatever your ...

September 25, 2014 in AnnMaria tagged AnnMaria / De Mars / The Julia Group by AnnMaria De Mars

Girls — I have mixed feelings whenever I read about the diversity efforts in the tech industry. On the one hand, as a Hispanic woman over fifty, I am certainly in favor of increasing diversity. There is research showing more diverse teams are more effective, and that only makes sense. Why would […]

Diversity in tech teams is good and we walk the ...

September 25, 2014 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Women in Tech by AnnMaria De Mars

On my first official day of the internship, I was able to try out the Spirit Lake free demo. (You can download it HERE) As part of the internship, I am responsible for the testing the user experience of the games offered by 7 Generation Games. Not only do I […]

Day 1: Spirit Lake Demo

September 23, 2014 in 7GenGames tagged 7GenerationGames / blog / Intern / Math / Native American History / Spirit Lake by AnnMaria De Mars

Yes, I do realize that I’m probably far more excited about our new website coming on line than is normal. Several points here on a Friday night: I completely disagree with those entrepreneurs who say, “You sell the sizzle not the steak” when what they mean is that they really […]

FINALLY we look like we know what we’re doing

September 20, 2014 in AnnMaria tagged steak by AnnMaria De Mars

No matter how hard it looks to make an educational adventure game, it’s even harder than that. The last couple of weeks, I have been at the tiny detail level. You know those really cool things you see made of legos in Legoland? Imagine if you were making one of […]

Building a game one lego at a time

September 13, 2014 in 7GenGames / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars