I really do like teachers. You know I do. I used to be a teacher, my brother is a teacher and my daughter is a teacher – all at the middle school level. Currently, in our spare time of which we have none, my brother, sister and I all teach […]
AnnMaria De Mars
You would think as a company creating software for education, both in school and at home, that we would be discouraged by an article with the title “Why For-Profit Education Fails”. You would be wrong. In fact, I agree with pretty much all of the Atlantic article but I found […]
Why we won’t fail
Since we just had our Latino tech meet up, this seems like the perfect time to give a tech tip on getting those Spanish-language accent marks right in your HTML. Look closely at this image below. It’s part of what was in one of our pretests that assess our game. […]
Tech tip: accent marks for Spanish text
We appreciate everyone who reads our blogs, listens to our podcast and plays games. That doesn’t mean we are friends, though. So, let’s get to know each other a little better! I’ll tell you five things you probably don’t know about us you can add comments anything interesting about you. […]
Five things you probably don’t know about 7 Generation Games
Have you seen the sign carried by a 90-year-old woman at a civil rights event that says, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit?” I was feeling like that today when I had forwarded to me by people who, correctly, thought I would find interesting […]
Dancing on the way to the pencil sharpener
In my last post, I mentioned that follow-up was one of the keys to getting the most possible out of a conference. The South Dakota Indian Education Summit was no exception. I always try to go to some sessions on topics I know absolutely nothing about. If you know me […]
Art, literacy and the South Dakota Indian Education Summit
Conferences are expensive. Even if you aren’t at one with a five – or six – figure registration fee, you still are taking days away from work. Probably, you are flying to another state, staying at a hotel and eating in restaurants. Why on earth would you spend all of […]
Four ways to waste your time at a conference
Often, people have told us that we should integrate the educational content more tightly with the games. However, that’s prohibitively expensive. The idea that we would have all of our educational content for example spoken by 3D characters in the games, or act it out by, say, catching 125 fish, […]
Making games better – Thanks to you!
It’s that time again when my cofounder and I travel far and wide to tell the world what we are doing with 7 Generation Games. Tuesday through Thursday of this week we are in San Jose, as part of the Innovate and Celebrate Conference sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association and […]
Maria and AnnMaria: the traveling gnomes
A better person than me probably would not feel a certain sense of self-satisfaction when an organization closes down. Good for them! Maria and I have been told many times over the years that “There is no money in education” or “All of the money comes from yuppie parents of […]
Why I’m not giving up on middle school kids
1 Previously, I blogged about why being a entrepreneur can be depressing. I promised that I would write later about how not to be depressed. So, now it’s later. There are two things that can make a HUGE difference in handling the difficulties that running a startup throws at you. The […]
How not to be depressed as an entrepreneur
This may be the only post you read this week, where someone asks you to send in pictures of your refrigerator magnets. This only goes to show you that the tasks one is required to do as a startup founder are unpredictable. Many of our games include mini games as […]