AnnMaria De Mars

By Abby Jones Ugh, my wrists! We’ve all been there, right? The start of a new school year, a new project—a new something!—that needs labels. If you are using our games you may decide to assign each student a username and password But that isn’t the bad part; you’ve got […]

Teacher Tip: Labels with Excel and Word

December 5, 2017 in Educational Resources / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

Girl about to set off on path — As you know, if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been meeting the past few weeks with high school students helping to improve the design of our games. Today, I asked students to submit cards with answers to prompts. They played Crossroads, a decision-making game that is still in prototype, Fish […]

Student design team results, continued

December 2, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

Angie, from Forgotten Trail — Part of making a good game is having believable characters, whether it is Mario, Zelda or the dwarf-hunter in World of Warcraft. If you had watched our Characters Behind the Characters video, you’d know that the voice of Angie is my daughter, Julia De Mars, and the “look” is a […]

Meet Angie: Character development in Forgotten Trail

November 28, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

When I installed the most recent Windows 10 update, I was disheartened that it broke my current installation, sending me into a panic as I tried to think about what I was going to do for grad school. After a few minutes, I remembered that I had three certifications on […]

The Office 365 Diaries, Part One

November 27, 2017 in 7GenGames / Educational Resources / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

If you follow this blog somewhat regularly, you may know that we started a software design project with a couple of alternative schools. How is that going? Thanks for asking. It’s going pretty well. The students have come up with a lot of specific suggestions, not just for improving game […]

Game Suggestions from Student Design Teams

November 27, 2017 in AnnMaria / Educational Games / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

I am sure that I should be writing a post to tell you all to buy our games, that it is Black Friday , Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday or whatever and your grandma doesn’t need another half-dozen coffee cups. For God’s sake , the woman has been on this […]

Simple hover effect without JavaScript

November 26, 2017 in AnnMaria / Code Talk by AnnMaria De Mars

Jose Gonzalez — We all know that teachers don’t get enough credit and recognition (as well as not enough money, supplies … should I go on?). While we cannot give every teacher a pile of cash for his or her classroom, we did want to start a monthly feature recognizing teachers who go […]

TEACHER FEATURE : José Braulio González, Gompers Middle School

November 22, 2017 in 7GenGames / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

snowy road — During the past few days, I had the opportunity to visit a couple of classrooms on and near the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation and observe their amazing students. We had a report that students were completing the games in half an hour. That didn’t seem possible. We’d had two professional […]

The Amazing Students from Spirit Lake

November 11, 2017 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Our company is doing a software design project with students from New Earth school (keep reading to find why this is extraordinary). The students complete a series of assignments to help us do a revision of one of our games. They start by meeting with one of our team members […]

And now for some good news: Software Design with New ...

November 3, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

boots — We’ve all had them – those teachers who really need to take their lesson plans, retire and go home. They’re teaching from the same set of yellowed lecture notes they wrote in 1974. I never want to be one of those teachers, so, on a regular basis, I try to […]

Putting Myself in the Students’ Shoes

November 1, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM by AnnMaria De Mars

checkbook — At age 15, I made a fake ID that said I was 18, left home, got a job and a checking account. That was over 40 years ago and it is probably harder to do in this age of computers when people can check up on you more easily. On […]

Someone Needs to Be Teaching This

October 29, 2017 in AnnMaria by AnnMaria De Mars

Sell the sizzle, not the steak I’ve always hated that Silicon Valley cliche. I know people saying it think they are smartly pointing out that people buy for reasons other than pragmatic ones. We want products that make us feel cool, sexy and superior. That focus on marketing can also […]

Be the solution, not the problem

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

Games That Make You Smarter