Games That Make You Smarter

Education: Innovation and STEM

Eva wearing her shades and drinking a Roy Rogers — First of all, I want to say I was wrong when, years ago, I said our American students were not that bad at math. I based this incorrect statement on: The fact that rankings on standardized tests are ordinal. So, just like the person who comes in 14th in the […]

Why you (and your kids) still suck at math: Part ...

January 22, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

drawing of Native American girl by student — AnnMaria, the president and founder of 7 Generation Games, visited Tate Topa Tribal School this week to hear students’ suggestions for characters, educational activities, and games. In short, we wanted to know, “How can we make our games even better?” Kids had a lot of great ideas. The 7 Generation […]

Kids Can Help Make Better Games

January 13, 2018 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Newsletter by Hannah Wren

I’m frequently told that I’m wasting my time talking to teachers. Investors tell me that. Other entrepreneurs tell me that. On occasion, even teachers tell me that. Their very logical point is that teachers often aren’t the ones who make the decisions about buying educational software. While an individual teacher […]

Why I want to talk to teachers

January 2, 2018 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

graph — As I mentioned in another blog, I’m teaching statistics to Fine Arts majors next semester and I decided the best way was NOT to have them compute the area under the normal curve between two z-scores. So, what am I doing? I’m starting in the first place by asking statistical […]

Learning Statistics with Graphs

December 9, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Resources by AnnMaria De Mars

cards with prompts — Whether it is teaching statistics, software design or writing, I think you need to remember that everything is easier once you’ve done it a bunch of times. I was talking to a couple of teachers I know about the software design project we are doing with a couple of local […]

Teaching Software Design with Writing Prompts

December 5, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Educational Resources / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

Girl about to set off on path — As you know, if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been meeting the past few weeks with high school students helping to improve the design of our games. Today, I asked students to submit cards with answers to prompts. They played Crossroads, a decision-making game that is still in prototype, Fish […]

Student design team results, continued

December 2, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

Angie, from Forgotten Trail — Part of making a good game is having believable characters, whether it is Mario, Zelda or the dwarf-hunter in World of Warcraft. If you had watched our Characters Behind the Characters video, you’d know that the voice of Angie is my daughter, Julia De Mars, and the “look” is a […]

Meet Angie: Character development in Forgotten Trail

November 28, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

Jose Gonzalez — We all know that teachers don’t get enough credit and recognition (as well as not enough money, supplies … should I go on?). While we cannot give every teacher a pile of cash for his or her classroom, we did want to start a monthly feature recognizing teachers who go […]

TEACHER FEATURE : José Braulio González, Gompers Middle School

November 22, 2017 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

snowy road — During the past few days, I had the opportunity to visit a couple of classrooms on and near the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation and observe their amazing students. We had a report that students were completing the games in half an hour. That didn’t seem possible. We’d had two professional […]

The Amazing Students from Spirit Lake

November 11, 2017 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Hello everyone, it’s Friday and that means that it’s time for the Freebie Friday. Today’s freebie is from our game Spirit Lake and it’s a video on a problem solving tip. The problem solving tip is to start at the end of the math word problem. Often, the problem that […]

Freebie Friday – Problem Solving Tip: Start at the End

November 3, 2017 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Freebie Friday tagged 7 Generation Games / Educational Games / Educational Resources / Freebie Friday by Diana Sanchez

Our company is doing a software design project with students from New Earth school (keep reading to find why this is extraordinary). The students complete a series of assignments to help us do a revision of one of our games. They start by meeting with one of our team members […]

And now for some good news: Software Design with New ...

November 3, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

boots — We’ve all had them – those teachers who really need to take their lesson plans, retire and go home. They’re teaching from the same set of yellowed lecture notes they wrote in 1974. I never want to be one of those teachers, so, on a regular basis, I try to […]

Putting Myself in the Students’ Shoes

November 1, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars