It’s the night before the election and statisticians are safe in their beds as visions of the Central Limit Theorem dance in their heads. Eight years ago, when President Obama was running against John McCain, I was discussing this in a statistics course that I was teaching and told the […]
AnnMaria De Mars
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
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
This evening, my granddaughter didn’t feel like watching her sister’s soccer practice, so she came over and proceeded to spend the next two hours playing with clay. We happen to have 50 different colors and a couple of play sets. While she was making her creations, she frequently stopped to […]
Why Do You Care So Much?
Hello, again. It’s Kelly from Rapid City, here on the parental front confronting the challenge of teaching my little particle more about the culture of first peoples than he is going to learn any typical fourth-grade classroom. 7 Generation Games provides authentic, historically correct first peoples’ context for math learning! […]
Field Notes from the Parental Front: Teaching Culture
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
by Kelly Barnes To help understand families of children playing 7 Generation Games, AnnMaria asked me to weigh in on 7 Generation Games as a parent, PTA volunteer and front-line in the efforts to improve our schools and society for the next generations. So, here you go, your first missive […]
Notes from the Parental Front
2 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
It’s almost midnight and I put the last two changes into Fish Lake so Dennis can do a new build and Devon can test it in the morning. The page for learning more about fractions on a number line looked like this: Now it looks like this: Our old […]
Making Better Games: Part 1,679
“I’m not Tom Cruise.” When a middle school math teacher said this, my initial response was, “No, duh.” He was irate, though, because this extremely qualified, knowledgable teacher had been told by his principal that he would not have any students failing in his class if he “made class more […]
Do what you love and never work a day in ...
Nothing over the past few years has changed my mind about “educational games”. Most of these are either bad games or bad education. I don’t – completely – blame the makers of those games, though. That’s like blaming television executives for all of the stupid programs on TV. If 13 million […]
The crazy economics of educational technology expectations
My brilliant niece, Samantha, has a term for it: yes-butter. Read to the end for why yes-butter is the death of so much new technology. I’m sure you’ve had yes-butter spread thickly on you as well. You know what I’m talking about – the people who, when they have a […]