Games That Make You Smarter

Education: Innovation and STEM

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

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

You made it through another school year and you don’t even want to think about the fall. Maybe you have two weeks left of school and you don’t even want to think about the fall. I understand, I really do. After grading 200 papers, submitting grades for students, you just […]

How You Can Be a Better Teacher

May 29, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Angie from Forgotten Trail in woods at night — Looking back at my time at UCLA, one experience that stands out is an education course I took where I developed curriculum for teaching incarcerated youth of color language arts, then implemented my lesson plans with the young men at BJN Juvenile Hall. (Incarcerated youth are disproportionally minority youths.) My […]

Teaching Incarcerated Youth Of Color – And What They Taught ...

May 17, 2018 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM tagged EdTech / Incarcerated Youth by Hannah Wren

Girl in boat. Math problem: What is the average number of miles rowed — Teaching math is a challenge and teaching it to English language learners can be twice as challenging. You might think the solution is to give the student textbooks in Spanish but not all Spanish-speaking children are Spanish-reading children. Often, their education has been in English, in which their fluency is […]

Six videos for teaching math to English Learners

May 13, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Last week, an investor told me, “You talk too much about why your games work to teach kids and how you know there is an impact. I don’t care. I just want to make money.” This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this and every time the person has been […]

I care about how our games are made & you ...

April 22, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

teaching — A few of my friends are joining the Teach for America staff after graduation. Teach for America’s mission is to ensure that low-income students have access to teachers. They recruit college graduates and train them in an accelerated program before placing them in low-income schools.The program varies by region, but […]

Can Anyone with a College Degree Teach?

April 5, 2018 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM / Start-up Diaries tagged Educational Games / teaching by Hannah Wren

Our last “teacher feature” starred 7th grade English teacher Tammy Green,recognizing her for all of her hard work. This month, we are spotlighting second grade teacher Samanntha Davis for the amazing energy she brings to her students each and every day. Samanntha was nominated by her mom, Paula, who sent us […]

Amazing Teachers Make a Difference: Samanntha Davis, Second Grade Teacher

April 3, 2018 in Education: Innovation and STEM / Newsletter tagged teachers / teaching by Hannah Wren

Babysitting my 10-year-old cousin is always a challenge. No, it’s not a challenge because he’s a bad kid. It’s a challenge because I have to get him to stop playing on his iPad and do his math homework. Anyone who has tried getting a kid to give up his or […]

7 Advantages of Educational Technology

March 7, 2018 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games tagged EdTech / Educational Games by Hannah Wren

rabbit — “School is the one place where we labor each alone.” For teachers, that no longer needs to be true. If you aren’t familiar with the Teachers Pay Teachers site for getting educational resources, well, the name is pretty obvious. If you’re a teacher and you have a cool lesson plan, […]

Teachers Pay Teachers

February 20, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Resources by AnnMaria De Mars

Spirit Lake linked to buy game — Our CEO, Maria, always tells me that I should not swear on the company blog. Today is trying my patience in complying with that policy because I think some of the ways math is taught are just unbelievably, inexplicably stupid. Take the counting up method of teaching subtraction. Now, I […]

Why the hell would you teach subtraction like that?

February 17, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

I am a bit embarrassed to say this but someone “improved” our teacher resources pages a while back and the results were, well see for yourself. Even worse, this page, and more like it, were around for a while before I caught the problem. (Keep reading, it does get better.) […]

Teachers aren’t stupid but they ARE busy

February 6, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Resources by AnnMaria De Mars