Games That Make You Smarter

Start-up Diaries

Me, 2 granddaughters and a moose — Recently, I had lunch with someone interested in founding a start-up. She asked me how much time I was able to spend on development each week, as opposed to meeting with investors, interviewing prospective employees, budgets, etc. She’d heard of founders who started a company because they wanted to develop […]

What Exactly Did You Expect from Start-up Life?

November 17, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

If you haven’t seen us lately, you haven’t seen us

November 12, 2016 in Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

fish — Several years ago, I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Albert Bandura (he happens to be the most-cited psychologist alive). He discussed one of his current research projects on what determines happiness. The key factor that stuck out to me was “An absence of self-ruminative thoughts.” This evening, […]

Late Nights and the Secret to Happiness

November 7, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

I’m really excited about the potential in our new iPad app, Making Camp. I’ve been taking an online course on mobile web design and it reminded me of all of the cool features we could use for mobile devices. We could use geolocation to compute distance from where the student […]

Mobile Development and Teachers’ Professional Development

November 2, 2016 in Game Progress / Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

Interacting with experts in educational technology, I sometimes wonder if they inhabit a different world from me. In this world, installing software is not an issue, Internet speed is no problem and every child has a computer or iPad. I hope I get to visit there some day. I spent […]

The EdTech Problem No one Talks About

October 27, 2016 in Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

I have wanted for a long time to revisit Fish Lake and make all of the improvements our wonderful users have suggested but other responsibilities (prototypes we had a grant to develop) took priority. We have been working on this revision as we could scrape away time, and lately we’ve […]

Game progress: The graphics

October 22, 2016 in Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

With the release of Making Camp (download it here!), we were recently reflecting on how far we’ve come as a company in the last three-and-a-half years. Startup life is filled with ups and downs and – as Maria and AnnMaria tackle here – some interesting characters to say the least. This […]