Games That Make You Smarter

Education: Innovation and STEM

Julia doing a science experiment — You know that saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” Well, my week has been something like that. I was showing our Spirit Lake demo at a school and realized that it HAD NOT BEEN UPDATED IN THREE YEARS !! The demo was supposed to look like this: … […]

Making Software Design from Lemons (or something like that)

October 9, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / New earth / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

When people at cocktail parties ask what I do for a living I often tell them I teach statistics to adults who don’t want to learn statistics and make math games for kids who don’t want to learn math. (Yes, I get invited to cocktail parties. I have friends!) Generally, the […]

Thoughts on Teaching: 100 word challenge for math and statistics

September 15, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Math by AnnMaria De Mars

Games we made — If you didn’t know, now you know, the South Dakota Indian Education Summit is in Pierre, South Dakota (what state were you expecting?) September 24-26 , 2017. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of smaller, education conferences. There are four general reasons why these are a good use […]

Six reasons to go to the South Dakota Indian Education ...

September 14, 2017 in AnnMaria / Cultural content / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

bike — Where do you get your ideas? This has to be one of the most common questions I get about game development and it’s interesting because I think design ideas are EVERYWHERE! Bad design gives me ideas how not to make things. Good design (more about that next post) gives me […]

Design ideas are everywhere: part 1

September 12, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

Game o — Maybe you’ve seen it as a meme or on a t-shirt on a random guy at the mall, it reads: Whenever I see that, I always want to say, “You probably did use algebra, it’s just that in real-life, no one says, ‘Oh, now this is the part of the […]

The Importance of Real-World Application in Education

August 21, 2017 in Education: Innovation and STEM / Parenting Like I Know What I'm Doing by Maria Burns Ortiz

I have had plenty of opportunities to retire comfortably. I have been a professor. I’ve worked as a statistical analyst at a large company. I’ve built a consulting company with long-term clients. If you have a short attention span – I will give you the answer now: The solution to […]

Why I quit my nice comfortable job

August 20, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Kids playing game — Kids will play a video game 50 times to incrementally improve, to get a fraction of a level further. Wouldn’t it great if they took that same approach when it came to homework problems? With educational games, that can happen! That realization is one that more and more people are […]

Why Your Kids Should Use Educational Games

August 16, 2017 in Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Educational Resources by Maria Burns Ortiz

basketball court — We launched our Kickstarter campaign for our bilingual AzTech Games series yesterday – hitting 13% of our goal in the first 12 hours – which was amazing! Of course, we still have a long way to go, and part of the reason why we decided to do a Kickstarter wasn’t […]

An Introduction to AzTech Games

August 11, 2017 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Educational Resources by Maria Burns Ortiz

Pyramids may have B.C.E. dates on a time line — Are you one of those people who just memorized the formula in math class and tried to get by? Did you memorize as much as you could of the math book and just hope that there were enough familiar problems on the test that you could at least pass the […]

Why you don’t understand math

July 29, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Math by AnnMaria De Mars

Julia and Austin, amused — I must have struck a chord with my previous post on helping (encouraging/ coercing) your adolescent to get a first job. I thought I provided some practical advice but received several emails asking for more. So, being the full service organization we are, here is my follow-up post with more suggestions […]

Parenting Productive Adolescents: Advice Needed

July 15, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Parenting Like I Know What I'm Doing by AnnMaria De Mars

sonogram of Julia — I have been teaching a very long time and in a wide swath of this country. I taught math to middle school students who were attending a special school due to severe behavioral and emotional problems. I taught developmental psychology, creating one of the first online courses ever offered at […]

What I learn from teaching while running a startup

July 9, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Women in Tech by AnnMaria De Mars

pi top laptop computer — Did you ever see those labs in the comic books or super hero movies? They’ve got these random parts and wires all over the place, a few minutes later, as the aliens are about to attack they’ve thrown together an Iron Man suit or programmed the planetary defense shield. You […]

You: A Real Scientist Super-Hero (sort of)

July 2, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars