I’m back! It’s been a while since I was on the blog, between Spirit Lake, Turtle Mountain and Las Vegas. Kind of ironic that I don’t gamble since so much of my time is spent staying in hotels with casinos. After two weeks of meeting with teachers and students in […]
Start-up Diaries
Lately, I’m feeling like Ben & Jerry – or maybe it’s Snapple. At any rate, some northeastern, cold weather states consumable product where they got their company off the ground by going to all of the local stores and talking the individual store owners into trying their product and seeing […]
Ben & Jerry Visit North Dakota
When I tell other entrepreneurs that I am half of the development team for 7 Generation Games, I’m met with a variety of reactions, few of them good. Polite disbelief: “So, you just use like Dreamweaver or WordPress to clean up some html, right?” Um, wrong. Disapproval: “As CEO, aren’t […]
Coding Your Own Stunts: Good or Bad?
The fact is, this is what teachers will be expected to teach and students will be expected to learn at specific grade levels.
Our Support for Common Core
The most exciting part about working in a start-up, and particularly at 7 Generation Games, is all of the new ideas that we are going to make happen. Right now, I’m adding Ojibwe to our newest game, Fish Lake. I designed the games so that a new language could be […]
In with the new!
This is one of my occasional posts for those of you interested in how software is made – at least at 7 Generation Games. There have been a lot of articles lately saying start-ups need to talk about their failures as well as successes. I can’t say we have had […]
Development in the Past Year
This week, we attended a two-day event for winners of the USDA Small Business Innovation Research awards. In a nutshell, the SBIR awards are given in two phases. The first phase is $100,000 for eight months to develop a prototype. That’s the money USDA gives you, you can spend more […]
What Happens When You Get a Group of Innovative Companies ...
If you’ve never read Sojourner Truth’s wonderful speech, “Aint I a Woman” given at the Women’s Convention in 1851, you have missed out. Here is my favorite part: That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best […]
Ain’t We a Start-up?
In designing Fish Lake, we have largely followed the Common Core State Standards and closely studied test questions from the various samples released to give schools an idea what to expect. There are times, however, when Common Core and I are at odds. For one thing, the assertion that one […]
The Common Core and Me
Jugglers don’t get paid very well – and sometimes the balls hit them in the head. That quote is supposed to remind us of the dangers of trying to do too many things at once. Thirty years ago, I was working as an engineer in aerospace, and I swear that […]
Jugglers Don’t Get Paid Very Well
Years ago, a client who had called me four times in three days to give me a contract, ended her last call with, “You must be independently wealthy that you don’t want this money I’m trying to give you.” Actually, I was on an American Indian reservation that, at the […]
One BILLION Dollars: Or why we are selling our game ...
A post on “toxic lies about start-up culture” by Shanley Kane really got me to thinking about our company. One of the lies she challenges is that meetings are evil, so you should have as few of them as possible. Our staff spans seven cities in three states, so getting together […]