AnnMaria De Mars

laundry room with several cardboard boxes
Sometimes AI works quickly and that's awesome. I'm even giving a paper on uses of AI at the SRAI conference in Hawaii and another the AISES conference in Portland, Oregon, both in October. It's called "Uses of Generative AI in research administration: The good, the bad and the ugly." I'm talking about the good, so I am not an AI hater. However, when AI doesn't give the correct answer on the first or second shot, I have found it to invariably be faster to forget AI and solve the issue without it. As far as the claim that generative AI has "Ph.D. level intelligence". If you measure that by whether a person has an actual Ph.D. , I have Ph.D. level intelligence and the score today is: Me: 1 , AI: 0

Me vs. AI Debugging Challenge

 in AnnMaria / blogposts / Code Talk / Educational Games / Start-up Diaries by
7 Gen Blocks Game Builder Splash block screen
TL; DR; To survive long-term, your company needs to make a profit. The work you are doing that pays money today is not developing a new product you aren't selling yet. So, there is a trade-off and innovation takes longer but your company is more likely to survive. I have a lot more to say but I need to get back to development. If you want to meet me in person, check out the bottom of this post.

A no-code educational game builder using YOUR intelligence: Why it ...

 in 7Gen Blocks / 7GenGames / Game Design by
Do multiplication word problems hurt your brain?
Problem-solving strategies give students a mechanism for identifying elements of a problem, determining a course of action, and checking the answer. However, sometimes students don’t have a wide enough array of strategies and we can't assume they'll discover these on their own. Fortunately, we have videos, games and lessons to help you teach a variety of strategies.

Problem-solving strategies have to be taught

 in Educational Games / Mathematics / multiplication by
Two young girls in a bedroom, one looks angry 1
I stick by what I said in my last post that I am skeptical of claims that AI is making hordes of people 5x developers. If that is the case, you probably sucked in the first place. Actually, that might be exactly it, because as I think of the areas that AI has helped me immensely, these are mostly in which I am not very good or knowledgable.

How AI makes me a 1.15x developer

 in Educational Games by
Create Studio app on two monitors and lunch on my messy desk
"If you could be profitable, even if it’s just barely profitable, then it allows you to live forever.  And then it allows you to grow and crescendo upon something very real." Matt Dalio Since 7 Generation Games is now profitable, hearing this just made my day, and it is totally true. So much of what is broadcast by founders is having that $1 million contract or raising that $500,000 seed round. We have been there and that is very cool to be able to tell people. The fact is, though, no matter how much revenue you have or the size of your Series A, if at some point your income doesn't exceed your expenses, your company is going to die.

Paying technical (and other) debt: Non-sexy but happy times

 in AnnMaria / Educational Games / Founders Corner / Start-up Diaries by
Page from a wiki showing a game path
Before I started my first company, before I earned a Ph.D. , I was a judo champion. I competed for 14 years - and I was pretty good at it. I won international competitions on every continent except for Antartica and Australia, and culminated by winning the world championships. Then I went off and did something completely different - was a professor teaching statistics, then a consultant doing statistical programming. Now I'm running a company, making educational games and, more importantly, creating a platform so anyone can make educational games.

3 Ways Becoming a World Champion is Like Making a ...

 in AnnMaria / Educational Games / Founders Corner / Start-up Diaries by