This category is for posts written by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars.
I’ve spent a good bit of my life living and working in places that many of my colleagues would not drive through in the middle of the day with the windows rolled up and the car doors locked, so you’ll have to excuse me if I am a bit cynical […]
When we started the Dakota Learning Project to evaluate our educational games, I wondered if we had bitten off more than we could chew. We proposed to develop the games, pilot them in schools, collect data and analyze the data to see if the games had any impact. We were […]
A friend of mine commented on one of his young employees as, “The worst combination you can get – someone who isn’t interested in the work and doesn’t need the money.” There are lots of advantages of being born into a well-off family. Your family can provide you introductions to […]
Yesterday, I did the Happy Dance in my office when we finished version 2.2 of Spirit Lake. I said that despite taking me away from virtually every other interest in my life, being obsessed with a start-up is worth it. WHY? In thinking it over today, I realized that 7 […]
Really useful advice for start-ups on How Not to Die from Paul Graham emphasized The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble…. We’re taking […]
It’s been a really productive two weeks in North Dakota, installing our game in schools on two reservations, in tribal schools and public schools. I didn’t write this post to talk about that. Rather, in keeping with some of the really useful posts I’ve read about start-up failures, I wanted […]
One of the questions I get asked a lot is “How do you get so much done?” I sometimes think that growing up without advantages can be an advantage. For example, when I was a kid, I never had my own room. I always shared it with my sister, or […]
So … it has been a crazy week. I am writing this (AnnMaria) because our CMO, Maria, is currently on a flight back to the east coast. We’ve been a little lax on posting updates (although we have actually been working on the game) because Ronda had a UFC world […]