AnnMaria and Dennis, who run our tech team, talk about technical debt. Which is basically when you know your code isn’t exactly the best way to do something, but it’s the quickest and you need whatever it is done now, so you take the shortcut understanding you’ll have to come […]
Start-up Diaries
Working at 7 Generation Games has been an amazing opportunity for me and I have been enjoying every second of it. Getting to play video games for a job has been my dream, being a part of creating a game, and working with amazing people has made my experience so […]
The Intern Diaries: Devon 1 Chapter
Steam is: A) The result when water is heated above 212 degrees B) An acronym for Science, Technology, Â Engineering, Art and Mathematics C) A platform for computer games When I tell people that I have been pretty much invisible lately because I’ve been getting Fish Lake ready for Steam they […]
You think you know what Steam is, but you don’t
Here is the thing about both running a startup and raising a child that people don’t talk about that often. There will be a point where you look around and ask yourself, “What was I thinking getting myself into this?” and “Can we just fast-forward past this stage because I […]
When Your Startup Becomes A Toddler
Recently, I had lunch with someone interested in founding a start-up. She asked me how much time I was able to spend on development each week, as opposed to meeting with investors, interviewing prospective employees, budgets, etc. She’d heard of founders who started a company because they wanted to develop […]
What Exactly Did You Expect from Start-up Life?
Lots of changes are happening in Fish Lake. Â I’ve posted a few of these over the past couple of months and now you can see some of them for yourself. There are 15 new videos. Originally, many of the educational videos were me talking over powerpoint slides with a bit […]
If you haven’t seen us lately, you haven’t seen us
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
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
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
With the release of Making Camp (download it here!), we were recently reflecting on how far we’ve come as a company in the last three-and-a-half years. Startup life is filled with ups and downs and – as Maria and AnnMaria tackle here – some interesting characters to say the least. This […]
7 Things to Never Say to Your Boss
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 […]