Games That Make You Smarter

Founders Corner

Day-to-day life in founding a start up

We founded 7 Generation Games seven years ago to meet a need we saw in our communities – the communities where we lived and the communities where we worked, communities that were underserved and overlooked. We saw that despite radical advances in technology over the last two decades, the equity […]

Become a Community Round Investor in 7 Generation Games

May 23, 2022 in Educational Games / Founders Corner by Maria Burns Ortiz

I wrote a blog post last week about community rounds and how we had been asked if we’d consider doing one. And since posting it, I have gotten a handful of questions that I figured I’d tackle in a single post that I could share more widely. In fact, some […]

Top Community Round Questions I’ve Gotten From Regular Folks, Traditional ...

May 16, 2022 in Founders Corner / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

Recently, I was asked if we would ever consider raising capital for 7 Generation Games via a community round. My answer was that I had not considered it – but now that the subject had been raised, I was interested in learning more. I mean, learning is literally the foundational […]

Would You Ever Consider Doing a Community Round?

May 9, 2022 in Founders Corner / fundraising / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

Making Camp Dakota — Whether you want the world to learn about the importance of turtles, cultural differences in bead work design or how to compute quartiles of temperature readings, you can make a game for it.

Think your game idea can’t happen? Think again.

May 3, 2022 in AnnMaria / blogposts / Customized Games / Educational Games / Educational Resources / Founders Corner / Newsletter tagged Custom video game development / Customized development / Video Games / Women that make video games by AnnMaria De Mars

Woman in front of an RV — Every organization has knowledge they want to share with the world and games are a great way to do it. Not everyone has the capacity to make educational games - that's where we come in.

What knowledge do YOU want to share with the world?

April 20, 2022 in 7GenGames / Customized Games / Educational Games / Founders Corner by AnnMaria De Mars

Two monitors on balcony — Wanting to download an app I learned about in Trinidad, I needed to sideload it on my Oculus Quest from my iMac. Not a trivial effort but not super difficult either.

Trinidad and Virtual Reality Sideloading

December 19, 2021 in Founders Corner / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

New trading scene — Making Camp Premium was already better than the math worksheets it replaced, but this update includes many teacher and student recommendations for improvement

When ‘better’ isn’t good enough for education

November 16, 2021 in Educational Games / Founders Corner / Game Progress tagged Math Games / Ojibwe by AnnMaria De Mars

AnnMaria head shot — Without teaching, I would not have had the opportunity to try so many different uses of our software to get those little black boxes with white letters to actually participate in class.

Four reasons a company president is still teaching

November 11, 2021 in Educational Games / Founders Corner by AnnMaria De Mars

In a recent conversation it became clear to me that I am not very good at explaining how 7 Generation Games is a profitable and growing business. That probably was made worse by the fact that we are re-releasing two of our apps using different technology to be able to […]

How we make money when content is not ours to ...

August 24, 2021 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria / blogposts / Code Talk / Customized Games / DevDiary / Educational Games / Founders Corner / Game Design / Game Progress / Newsletter / Start-up Diaries tagged 7 Generation Games / 7GenGames / Cultural Content / devdiary / entrepreneur / software developer / successful businesses / women-owned business by AnnMaria De Mars

salmon — When you have six times as many people using your products you need to increase your staff, and quickly. The end result is more features, more support - but less sleep for us while we scale up.

User numbers, you and the fail whale

February 2, 2021 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria / Educational Games / Founders Corner by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars from August 1, 2014 “My House is Dirty but my Conscience is Clean” that we wanted to share in case you missed it the first time around. Now that all of my kids are doing […]

My House is Dirty but my Conscience is Clean

May 29, 2020 in AnnMaria / Founders Corner / Throwback Thursday tagged AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday by Diana Sanchez

In gaming, they talk a lot about the communities – the overall gaming community, the Steam community (get us on Steam today!), a game-specific community. Education is the same way – the homeschool community, the charter school community, smaller PTA-type communities. One of the great things about these kinds of communities is the way […]

The Value of Community

December 16, 2016 in Founders Corner by Maria Burns Ortiz