Games That Make You Smarter

Start-up Diaries

Whether or not you backed us on Kickstarter, you’d probably find our Family Textbook hilarious. It’s a book of, you guessed it, our family group text. If you didn’t back us on Kickstarter for $50 or more, you won’t be getting one, but you can still read about what you’re […]

“Who said it?” Trivia game from our Family Textbook

October 24, 2017 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

If your entire exposure to county extension agents has been the clueless guy on Green Acres, you are about to be pleasantly surprised. I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’ve been criss-crossing the country in planes and automobiles to meet with schools about our games. Maria told me that […]

Sioux County is not your grandmother’s 4H and it’s AMAZING

October 17, 2017 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

To go or not to go? Every time an invite comes into my mailbox for X random professional event, the first thing I ask is “Is it going to be worth my time?” Then I immediately reply to myself, “Who ever knows?” That’s the reality with all of these professional […]

Deciding which professional networking events to attend

October 11, 2017 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

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

water garden and wilshire offices — Anyone who runs a startup will tell you it borders on being life-consuming. There’s no 9-to-5, You’re constantly working on building your company, including evenings and weekends and those times you wake up in the middle of the night realizing you need to email someone back and that you still […]

Taking My Work Home With Me – To The Extreme

October 4, 2017 in Parenting Like I Know What I'm Doing / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

View of lake from top of a hill — Ten days, nine cities, three states If you’re one of the 2,000+ email messages in my inbox, sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. If you’re one of the 18 voicemail messages I got yesterday asking, “Where have you been?” Well … It’s been a busy 10 days. Los Angeles […]

Entrepreneurship – not for faint of heart: 10 days, 9 ...

September 30, 2017 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

jungle scene — Thanks to our wonderful Kickstarter backers, I am in the middle of adding an Easter egg to Aztech Games. It’s a simple “find the hidden objects” type of game where you have a minute to find everything. Here is the problem: I want the images to be layered. As you […]

Tech Tip: Clicking through a layer

September 12, 2017 in Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

juice — I read this week that Juicero is going out of business. If you are not one of the cool kids you might not be aware that this is the company that made a $700 juicer, later reduced to the bargain price of $400. In this case, you might be interested […]

Seriously, is this what you want to do with your ...

September 5, 2017 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

100 elementary school kids with our posters — Let’s talk about the power of the U.S. Latino market. Wait, you might be asking yourself, a post about Latinos and its not even Hispanic Heritage Month? Yes, we’re crazy like that over here at 7 Generation Games. But seriously, we’re in the midst of completing our AzTech Games […]

Why Going Bilingual Not Only Makes Sense But Makes Money

August 31, 2017 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

It has been brought to my attention lately that I have not been blogging very much and some people would like to hear more about what is happening. Well, I was kind of at this wedding thing – if you don’t know, now you know, my lovely next-to-youngest daughter got […]

Educational Game Secret: Girls (and boys) just want to have ...

August 31, 2017 in AnnMaria / Educational Games / Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

When brainstorming our Kickstarter rewards, we wanted to come up with some really cool things that would be unique to what we’re doing here at 7 Generation Games and our team. The “textbook” (in this case, it’s a literal book of texts) was one of the first things that popped […]

Get a Look Behind-the-Scenes with Our Literal “Text-Book”

August 25, 2017 in 7GenGames / Reality Show / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

Yesterday, I wrote about how SBIR awards are a highly competitive, but also amazing way to fund your startup’s R&D. (Speaking of funding startups, you should totally back our Kickstarter!) Today, I’m following that up with the biggest misconceptions I keep running across that will ensure that you do NOT […]

How NOT to Get A Grant

August 15, 2017 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz