Last week, I wrote about my disagreement with those who want to go out and hire a code monkey. Being deeply immersed in writing a computer game to teach kids math, here is my perspective from the monkey cage on the benefits of coding your own stunts. I like it. This seems to be a…
Having received email from readers who believe that Spirit Lake: The Game is exploitative or disrespectful of Native Americans, I asked the individual who designed the Level 5 problem shown in my blog post of November 18 to respond in a guest post. What I Hope to Accomplish with a Math Game for Native American…
On the long list of things that irritate me, few score higher than people who have “an idea” for a start-up and are then going to find “you know, people” to code it for them. I was cheered up when I ran across this youtube video where AngelList founder Naval Ravikant advises the winners of…
Lots of random people give me advice. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because: I really do try very hard to listen to other people openly and, I go out of my way to meet new people. Neither of these traits come naturally to me and I have to put a lot of effort into…
I decided about a year ago that it was time to write an educational game to teach math. None of the languages I knew were an optimal choice for this. I’d been programming in SAS for 30 years and it’s an excellent choice for processing the data that come in from pre-tests, student answers and…
We shipped. Again. It was not everything I wanted to go into version 1.1 but we had four days to get it installed on all of the computers being used at our test site and one of those days was being taken by FedEx to get our flash drive to North Dakota and the other…
Not a day goes by that I don’t read an article saying I don’t exist. Apparently, there are no women actually running start-ups, no Latinos in technology. No one outside of Silicon Valley is doing anything. Maybe I’m a unicorn. Or perhaps I’m invisible. If I were to actually exist, and if it was possible…
I’m never going to understand the idea that start-ups are for young people. It is like the ads you see where people want a 25-year-old with 15 years of experience, you know, “Expert in C++, systems administration, Linux, Windows, SAS, R, Hadoop, Ruby, Python and Java. Must have 5-plus years experience in development for mobile…
Twenty-eight years ago, I won the world judo championships. Unlike almost everyone else who accomplishes that feat, I did NOT go into running a judo school, selling martial arts supplies, or, more recently, mixed martial arts. Photo courtesy of Hans Gutknecht of the Los Angeles Daily News On the contrary, I immediately went into a…
Testing in the schools starts in a few weeks. We’ve been writing a computer game to teach math. Here is a look at some of the scenes. The poster is thanks to one of the awesome members of our graphics team, Justin Flores. You can find him at Jflo Productions. Of course, we will be…