I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know what a Quora session was until someone asked me to do one. Today, as a public service, I will tell you how you can ask me questions on Quora, what a Quora session is and what is Quora. I posted something very similar […]
AnnMaria
I’m frequently told that I’m wasting my time talking to teachers. Investors tell me that. Other entrepreneurs tell me that. On occasion, even teachers tell me that. Their very logical point is that teachers often aren’t the ones who make the decisions about buying educational software. While an individual teacher […]
Why I want to talk to teachers
Here’s the problem – at the start of Aztech: The Story Begins, the characters are in a history classroom and have to take a pop quiz. Players click on a highlighted word and three choices appear for definition. Clicking on the wrong definition turns the word red and plays a […]
Solving the monkey click problem: Easiest way to temporarily disable ...
Going through our archives, we came across this great post by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars from December 13, 2013 “Demo of Spirit Lake: The Game” that we wanted to share in case you missed it the first time around. This is my day job. For those of you who thought […]
Throwback Thursday – Demo of Spirit Lake: The Game
Going through our archives, we came across this great post by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars from December 12, 2010 “The Opposite of Lazy Isn’t Disciplined” that we wanted to share in case you missed it the first time around. It’s often been said that judo, football and other sports teach […]
Throwback Thursday: The Opposite of Lazy Isn’t Disciplined
Life is sweet. After months of revisions, translations and testing, Aztech: Meet the Maya will be submitted to the app store by the time I get done drinking this martini. Champagne would be more appropriate but it was after midnight when we made the last mandatory change and all the […]
Eating my own dog food: Learning Spanish from a game
I’ll confess right up front that I’m not as organized as I’d like to be when it comes to game design or, well, anything. However, let’s pretend I was. In that case, I’d start out by considering what assets I need for the Caves and Ladders game I discussed in […]
Game Design Basics: Assets
As you may have heard, I will be heading to Santiago in about a month to be part of Startup Chile, where I’ll be expanding our line of bilingual games for the Latin American market. First on the agenda is to do a Latin American version of Making Camp. The […]
Designing my way to Chile, Part 1
For the tl;dr crowd, this post has two lessons: Never underestimate your own influence. Never miss an opportunity to learn from anyone you meet. This whole journey that ends with me in Santiago, Chile, started with a conversation with a teacher from a small school in Missouri. I had a […]
How Listening to a Teacher from Missouri Led Me to ...
Going through our archives, we came across this great post by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars from October 20, 2016 “Seeing Further Down the Road: Why Your Parents Think Different From You” that we wanted to share in case you missed it the first time around. At the National Indian Education Association […]
Throwback Thursday – Seeing Further Down the Road: Why Your ...
As I mentioned in another blog, I’m teaching statistics to Fine Arts majors next semester and I decided the best way was NOT to have them compute the area under the normal curve between two z-scores. So, what am I doing? I’m starting in the first place by asking statistical […]
Learning Statistics with Graphs
Whether it is teaching statistics, software design or writing, I think you need to remember that everything is easier once you’ve done it a bunch of times. I was talking to a couple of teachers I know about the software design project we are doing with a couple of local […]