EP018: From Judo to JavaScript, & Fighting for What Matters with AnnMaria De Mars

AnnMaria: I was 12 years old. I was a short, fat little kid with really thick glasses. And my mom came in and said, “you cannot sit in your room all day and eat and read books. You need to do something.

But being poor really makes things difficult. And that year, somehow or other, she had squirreled away enough money to get a family membership to the YMCA. So she took me down there and she pushed me outta the car and said, “join something.” And I did not want to, but my ride had driven away.

And back then, before Title ix, most sports didn’t allow girls to join. So my three choices were track, which if you’re a short fat little girl, you don’t run fast. And swimming, which if you’re a fat little girl, you do not wanna put on a swimsuit. The other thing was judo. The judo instructor had a sister and I always think I should make up a good lie about, I wanna be a ninja that, but no, the judo instructor had a sister and so he “allowed” girls to join.

And yeah, I was a fat little kid, so I was hard to lift up and I was really short, so I was hard to get under and I was from a very disorganized environment. Let’s just say that politely. So I was used to fighting and yeah, I was good at it from the get go. And when I was at school and I I beat up another kid, I got suspended and at Judo I beat up another kid and they gave me a medal. 
 

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

Ah, this is an episode that I am super excited about. It is with AnnMaria DeMars, who is a Judoku champion, tech founder, grandmother, just an all around amazing person. Um, had a little bit of, uh, uh, audio glitch in this one, but please just stick with it because there are some stories in here that you are not gonna want to miss.

So, without further ado, let’s go to the mat.

This is gonna be a real treat, the first official interview with someone with a real Wikipedia page, so we got a lot to talk about.

Dr. AnnMaria De Mars Judo Champion, four time tech entrepreneur, an educator with a groundbreaking career. In 1984, she became the first American to win gold at the World Judo Championships. Beyond sports, she holds a PhD in educational psychology and has applied her expertise to technology and learning.

As the founder of 7 Generation Games, she develops educational software focused on improving math literacy, particularly for Native American communities and underserved communities. In 2013, Forbes recognized her as one of the “40 women over 40” to watch. And then she was inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame in 2016.

So a true innovator. I’m very excited about this. She’s also the mother of Rhonda Rousey, who you know is Olympic judo medalist, followed footsteps. And Maria Burns Ortiz, a sports journalist and co-founder at 7 Generation Games, so a whole sports tech family here. I’m excited. Thanks for joining.

AnnMaria: Well, thanks for having me.

Joel: I always wanna start off with the same question, which is your nerd origin story. Now, you can tell the jock to nerd origin story. Maybe we can get into that, but I would love to hear a little bit about your upbringing, your passions, and what led you to to founding this company.

AnnMaria: I always liked math and I started programming with punched cards back when I was 15. I was a bad kid. When people say, oh, I’m sure you wear that bad. Oh no. I was the person your mother warned you about. So I was sent to an alternative school after getting in too much trouble in the regular high school.

And they had an agreement with St. Louis University. We were an inner-city school, and we could write programming statements and then they would get one trustworthy student who was not me, to go down to St. Louis University a few blocks away. They would type in our code in the key punch machine, then 12 hours or a day or two later, depending on the traffic with the students and that we would get.a printout back, and maybe it would have errors in it. So that was my start with programming.

I remember one of the first things, I’m old, right? We were, I kid you not our math teacher’s, alternative service to Vietnam. He was a conscious objector. And so his alternative service was to teach us, and I’m sure there’s days that he had regretted that decision.

And one day he came in and he drew a picture of Mickey Mouse on the board and said, write the equations to teach a computer how to do this. So, of course, you know the circle, you would have the equation for circle, and then you could have two eyes that could be circles, and then you could have, two more little circles inside of that for the pupils.

And then you could have two inverted parabolas on different sides for the ears with the negative on the x axis and a positive. So they were on opposite sides. And I just thought that was the coolest thing I. I think because I had so much trouble in a lot of other areas, like the state terminated my parents’ parental rights and took us away.

There are so many things there isn’t an answer to. Right. Like what’s the best way to raise kids? I have four kids and they’re all very successful. I have no idea. Right. Or why does politics seem to be insane? And how do you get people in who actually care about the care? I don’t know. But what is the square root of 49?

It’s seven.

Joel: Right.

AnnMaria: So I have always, I think coming from a fairly chaotic background, really liked from the get go, from being a little kid, things where you could have an answer and you could prove it was the right answer, and nobody could tell you were wrong.

Joel: So the math was pretty concrete, but then you got into some of the higher math. And I’m, I will admit I’m not a math person at all. We talked earlier, my, my son is gifted at math. Could give a rip about it. But he asks these amazing questions and I’m like, dude, I have no idea.

Let’s go watch a YouTube video about it. And I get sucked in at how. Incredible. It is. So, it’s concrete, but it’s not it’s not just straightforward and rote. Once you get into some of those higher level mathematics what drew you into the athleticism then and the judo.

 If you discovered math so early, they often say that brains and bra don’t don’t mix, but you are not you are the exception to that rule.

AnnMaria: I was way into math before I got into judo. I was 12 years old. I was a fat little, short, fat little kid with. Really thick glasses. I was still living at home at the time and my mom came in and said, “you cannot sit in your room all day and eat and read books. You need to do something.” And she, I think like a lot of families had issues.

My mom was not a bad person, but being poor really makes things difficult. And that year, somehow or other, she had squirreled away enough money to get a family membership to the YMCA. So she took me down there and she pushed me outta the car and said, “join something.” And I did not want to, but my ride had driven away.

And back then, before Title ix, most sports didn’t allow girls to join. So my three choices were track, which if you’re a short fat little girl, you don’t run fast. And swimming, which if you’re a fat little girl, you do not wanna put on a swimsuit. ’cause then you hear all these comments about whale, right?

And now I’m really small right. Well, I never got any taller, but I got, I have not been fat for years. The other thing was judo. The judo instructor had a sister and I always think I should make up a good lie about, I wanna be a ninja that, but no, I walked in, I had three choices, judo. The judo instructor had a sister and so he allowed girls to join.

Can you believe that’s how it was back then? Right. And she was a black belt, so I was one of the very few women of my age that saw a black belt in front of young men. And yeah, I was a fat little kid, so I was hard to lift up and I was really short, so I was hard to get under and I was from a very disorganized environment. Let’s just say that politely. So I was used to fighting and yeah, I was good at it from the get go. And when I was at school and I I beat up another kid, I got suspended and at Judo I beat up another kid and they gave me a medal. And pretty soon I was, eventually I was studying in Japan.

I did year abroad scholarship as part of Washington University in St. Louis. And now of course we think of Japan as being someplace very advanced business. But again, this is over 50 years ago. So I went to the dean of the business school and said, “I want to go do a study abroad.”

And back then it was, he said, it’s people who major in foreign language or humanities, Spanish literature that go study abroad. He said, we’ve never had anybody in the business school do that. But then he said, there’s no reason you can’t. You signed off my paperwork and off I went.

Joel: Math here. Math here is the same as math there, right. There are no reason to travel but what was drawing you into that? Was it the opportunity to to get some of the martial arts training over there? Or was that like the ride you were looking at, or…

AnnMaria: it was totally so I could go do judo in japan. 

Joel: Yeah. Yeah. 

AnnMaria: …and told them they weren’t gonna pay for that. So I’m like, oh, I wanna go study a Japanese business, which make me look very forward thinking. Right.

Joel: Definitely. Before the the rise of the samurai businessman ethic and all that stuff that we did, that we dabbled with here in the, I guess the mid eighties. I’d love to know about, and maybe any parallels that you draw between mathematics and judo. Judo is a very it’s a physical activity, but it’s also very strategic.

And obviously there’s physics and all that type of stuff involved. But. You started in, in math and came through sort of the athletics and really achieved at that and then found your way back to math. Are there any direct lines or, threads?

AnnMaria: I do think that math is one of the reasons that, or statistics specifically that I was successful at judo. And part of the reason my daughter was successful as well, because I coached her when she was little, and this is gonna sound really conceited, but I don’t care. I was 18, 19 years, I was 19 years old when I graduated from Washington University in St.

Louis. So I figured I’m smarter than most people, right? Most people don’t graduate from college when they’re 19. And how can I apply this to judo so that I could win more? And so I started thinking about it sorry, strategically, which a lot of people do not. And one of the things I thought about is most people, at the time, and probably still most people won by throwing.

So there, there are four ways you can win in judo. You can throw somebody, you can pin them, you could choke them, you could arm bar them, or I guess there’s a fifth way you can win on points or penalties. So most people won based on throws. So I thought if that’s where most people are, then it would make sense for me to focus on the mat work part of it.
 

When I went to Japan, they were very good at throwing, they had a ton of people on the mat. They had a lot of people to train with, but because they had a ton of people in the mat. They didn’t practice that transition from throwing to mat work because once you threw somebody, you had to get up because there were a lot of people on the mat and they’d step on you or you get thrown on or whatever.

But in a tournament, you do have that transition. And Thorndike’s law of transfer. My daughter Rhonda always laughs at me ’cause she’s “only, you would quote somebody who’s a PhD, talk about judo. But Thorndike was an educational psychologist who said that the closer skill is practiced in the situation to which it is supposed to be applied, the more transfer will occur.
 

And I was probably the best person in the world. And again, that sounds, immodest, but I did win the world championships and I think I was the best person in the world at that transition, that I beat so many people on the mat and they knew I was gonna go to the mat with them.

And why did I do it? Because I had practiced that in that exact situation more than them. Well, if you apply that to software development, didn’t think I was gonna get there didja? but, or math. So often our mathematics is taught in a sense of “what, seven times, eight” Now I have been working in math for my entire life as an engineer, as a statistician, as a software developer running multiple businesses.

Never in my life has anyone run into my office. And said, “quick, AnnMaria, what is the standard deviation of 4, 8, 12, and 19?” And then ran out before I could answer, right? But that’s how we teach math. So, and so much of it is taught a very disembodied way. And often this is true of programming as well. I used to say, and I teach at National University in my spare time, I don’t have, I teach epidemiology and biostatistics and occasionally advanced quantitative data analysis and.

First of all, when I first started doing the quantitative data analysis course, this is how it’s amazing they let me out without adult supervision. I looked at what the other last professor did and I told the dean, I’m not doing this. They, all of these lectures are like mathematical proofs and solving these equations by hand.

And this is the 21st century we have computers and I used to say I would never hire anybody right outta graduate school. Because they didn’t know how to do anything. I don’t need somebody to prove the central limit theorem for me, I need somebody who can take the set of data and answer a question that one of our clients would have.

Like, did this program actually increase the rate of technology transfer from universities to businesses and how, and by how much? And that’s similar to what I did with Judo taking, this is the situation where I need to apply these skills and I’m gonna practice exactly that. If I am creating an educational game, I, when I interview people for my company, I don’t do those stupid Google tests.

Show me how they do a bubble sort. No, you can Google that. All right. What I’d say is bring in some code that you’ve written that you really are excited about or proud of, and walk me through the decisions you made and how you did it. So if that’s my specialization with my PhD is applied statistics and that’s how I have gone all the way through.

How can I take this information I learned, whether it’s how to teach math or how to interest kids, how to make a game and apply it to solve real problems that people have.

Joel: That. Yeah, that’s fantastic. I, I came up in the early days of, you would just get computer labs in school and so, the Oregon Trail and Carmen San Diego, and there’s these really classic games which I. I think today still hold up. Right? As far as they’re story driven, they present a problem and then they help you find the tools to uncover them.

I guess Oregon Trail is a little bit more history based story but you play it enough, you start to figure out, what, how things work. Today with educational technology, and I so I, I. I did some early work with Nickelodeon in high school. And one, one class that I dabbled with was early childhood education.

I always thought I would go in that direction. So I’ve always been fascinated by the state of education and entertainment. Just. Recorded a, an interview with somebody where she was talking about the state of educational entertainment as popular media has gone. But with 7 Generation Games, you’re really, it’s not fluff, like you say, it’s not just an excuse or busy work that, that a teacher can pull up.

You’re doing, you’re telling stories, you’re getting very deep in, into, even the culture because you target, specific communities. I’d love to hear a little bit about the founding of that, the mission and some of the decisions that you’ve made about the development for these for these games.

AnnMaria: Well, I wanted to do this for decades and in fact what happened was eventually the hardware caught up with me so many years ago. When I was in grad school, I was teaching children who are emotionally disturbed. In high school, middle school students, gang bangers who had been expelled from their previous school and sent to a special school where I taught, and many of these kids had severe psychological emotional problems.

They had been beaten by their parents in terrible ways. They just really, if you had been raised that way, it would be amazing that you would be normal, so to speak. And I was teaching math. When the psychologists are working with these kids, I realize, you’re in eighth grade and you’re doing fourth grade math.

Even if they get you to the point where you’re not cussing people out and trying to beat up your boss, you have no real skills, like, how are you ever gonna get a job? So I thought if I could create a computer program that could teach the kids math, so remove that authority, figure they’re rebelling against, and then they could get ahead academically when they finally over here, when they finally solved their other issues, they would actually be in a position where they could go out and get a job and have a good life, which is what I wanted for them. But if you think about in the 1980s, as text-based stuff, their very first Mac computer, so there wasn’t a lot you could do.

I did some text-based games and then graduated with my PhD that I did on educational testing and went off and did other things. So there are two types of people who would be good tech entrepreneurs, and I think we underestimate the second type. You need to take a risk, right? You need to maybe go years without adequate income ’cause you have to make this game. And so the whole time you’re making it, nobody’s paying you. And then once you made it, if it’s an educational game, you have to test it and see that it actually teaches kids something. So again, nobody’s paying you. So there’s a two or three year gap there maybe. And maybe you’ll never make money.

So two kinds of people can afford to do this. One young people who are still in school, living with their parents or living with a bunch of roommates and have a very low expenses. And the other is people who have saved up some money and their kids are gone. I tell you what, when I made that last college tuition payment, I felt like I won the lottery.

So my kids had gotten older. We had, the oldest, the first three were outta the house and on their own, the youngest, my youngest daughter is much younger than the other three. But we had paid, we had saved up enough for her college tuition. She had gotten a full a scholarship to a college prep high school so we could take the risk.

And a friend of mine that I co-founded Spirit Lake Consulting with, Erichh Longie, we went to Washington DC, analyzed the National Indian Education Study, and this is data on every Alaska Indian or Native AmErichhan child in the school system. And what we found was that the more kids learned about their native culture and language, the worse they did in school.

I know I made the same face as you. This surprised me. Now, Erich, who was my co-researcher on this study, is from the Spirit Lake Nation. He’s the first member of the Spirit Lake Nation to earn a doctorate. He had been the school board on the school board, maybe school board president, but I was on the school board there.

He’d been the teacher there, tribal college president. So he knew Native American education from the ground up as well as, having attended reservation schools and having kids at ground. And he said to me, “come on, you’re a statistician. You’re good at math. Look at it. If you have six hours in a school day and you take an hour out of the day to teach, say Dakota, a language.

And then you take another half hour of the day to teach Dakota history. Now you have four and a half hours in school

And where you think that hour and a half is coming from.” And he said, “with a lot of elementary teachers, math and science are their least favorite subjects. And he goes, mostly math, so it’s coming outta math.”

So we’re in DC we’re sharing a cab back to the airport, and he looks at me and he says, “I’m not gonna accept this, that my kids or my grandkids. And my grandkids that they will learn their culture, they learn math. We have to come up with something.” Well, and at the time I was working for a consulting company, makin’ bank doing what you do, driving up and down the 4 0 5 to offices and working in a cubicle.

And Erichh calls me up one day and he says, “I know you. You don’t wanna spend your life driving up and down a freeway and working inside of a box. Let’s start a company here on the reservation so we can employ people. So my relatives don’t have to make the choice between using their education and living within their culture.”

And I said, “well, what kind of company would we make?” And he said, “well, you come up with something.” So I said, well, I had this idea about educational games way back away. So it all converged. And when we started the company, we needed somebody to do the accounting and stuff like that, so Erich’s sister, April at the time was the.

The controller for the tribe. She’s an accountant, so we offered her 10% of the company to be our accountant. And then we signed our incorporation papers in the tribal administration building. And I wrote a check ’cause I was the only one of the three of us that had $150 in the bank account at the time.

And I said, we’re gonna make a million dollars. And April laughed and Erich said That’d be nice. Within 22 months we had a million dollars in for the business. Okay.

Joel: Wow. And, and that was the, first venture. You’ve got many, several after that. 

AnnMaria: That was Spirit Lake Consulting. So we did statistical evaluations. We also did, what I used to call “slices of the internet” back when half the country had internet. The other half didn’t. That’s how math works, right? So we would go to these remote, rural places that didn’t have internet and provide training.

You wanted training on caring for people with chronic illness and disease. Say taking care of people who are diabetic, taking care of people who are bed bound. You’re in a small community. You don’t have a lot of people. You are getting whoever you can get, and they need to be trained how to do a transfer from the bed to a chair to a wheelchair.

How to. For how to follow a behavior plan for a child who has severe emotional problems and so forth. We would go to all these various organizations that had websites, that had materials, PDFs and say, “Hey, would you like us to share your information around the country?” And if they said “yes, go with God,” we would put it on a cd.

We would go into places like the tribal college, they had a computer lab. Often the people in the. In the workshop, hadn’t touched a computer before in their life. Show ’em how to log, how to use a computer, how to put in the cd, and sometimes they had internet access, like AOL version of dial up internet.

So we might have some links that you could go to that were purely text based. And yeah, so that’s what we did. That was our first thing, selling slices of the internet. Then we moved to doing online courses. I taught the first online course ever for tribal college. We did those as static web pages, and then when again, we moved with the technology. Then when it got possible to make educational games, the first games we made were for Mac and Windows, because this is before Chromebook existed.

And then of course, half the schools went to Chromebooks and we had to port to making things would be playable online. And yeah, that’s, so we went from Spirit Lake Consulting and then, the sad thing that happened is, well, the not sad thing that happened is April got a job as general manager of the casino, so she had to sell her share.

You cannot have anybody, it casinos are very strict on other

Joel: Sure. Yeah.

AnnMaria: o, other interest for reasons. Right. Then Erich got cancer and he was given five years to live. He just passed away last year. He lived 15 years. He got into a clinical trial, but. At the time, he said, “if I only got five years left to live, I wanna spend to go into powwows and spend it out with my grandchildren.”

So he sold his share of the company to me, and then it was just me owning the whole company. And it couldn’t be called Spirit Lake Consulting because I’m not a member of the Spirit Lake Nation. April and Erich, we, so we started, it was majority. So we’re drive. I’m coming back from one of these things in DC and my little daughter is in the backseat in her car seat.

We’re going, I’m talking to my husband. We’re trying to come up with a name for the new company and it’s gonna be, Erich’s gonna take the training contracts. And I was gonna take all the data evaluation software development, ’cause that’s my thing. And we’re joking about not being able to come up with a name for the company.

And we ask our little daughter in the back seat, Dennis says, “Hey, mom needs a name for a new company. What do you think she ought to call it?” She says, “she should name it after me.” So he named it the Julia Group.

So that was my second company that focused. And there. Hi, Q is Julia. So the second company was just data analysis and valuation.

You got a grant for $2 million to reduce alcoholism in Lansing, 

Michigan. At the end of five years, you don’t get to write to the state of Michigan or the federal government, say, “I did well. Send me 3 million. This time.” Somebody has to put together a research plan to see if you really did that or not.

Hopefully, somebody from outside your area that has no conflict of interest. So that’s what I did for many years. And then if you also wanted some online courses developed or something, basically our tagline to this day says, if it touches a number, we do it. Think Erich still got this idea that he wanted to do games, and so then we came up with 7 Generation Games and we wanted to do something.

That was pretty different than the data analysis. That purely data analysis I was doing. It went together because the first grants we got, the first contracts we got were to do research on if these games really worked. So the data analysis part of it. The collecting data on every single thing.

What makes kids play? The problem with most educational games is that they’re either bad education or they are bad games. So you have a lot of education, quote unquote, educational games that don’t teach anything. The ones that drive me insane are the coding games. I have nine grandkids and.

Three of them are under five, but the other six are in various stages of elementary through high school. And in elementary school, “I’m learning coding!” I said, “great. What language you’re learning?” And one of ’em said, “English” this is coding because it has if then statements if they do this. No, I don’t think that’s coding.

The, I, well, I always had a, an alternative school once I, my sweet spot is kids who don’t wanna learn. Math, which is most of them to be honest. So, people say, “well, why do we need you kids can go to the Khan Academy?” Are you kidding me? I go around this country to schools and I will tell you that no matter what school it is, unless it’s a very expensive private school with very affluent kids whose parents are super involved, the vast majority of schools, anywhere from 10 to 50% of kids in a math class are turning in their worksheets with nothing on but their name. They’re just not doing it. And I don’t care how great of a teacher you are, and at many schools, I’d say the average is probably 25%. They just aren’t doing it. And what I tell kids, whether it’s in judo, whether it’s in math, whether it’s in game design classes, you can screw your life up in one of two ways.

You can really screw up. You knock over a liquor store and you get sent up for seven years. You are drunk and you run over a lady with a baby, at a stroller, and you kill her baby. You do horrible, stupid things. Or you can screw it up by small decisions every day. And one of those small decisions every day is you just don’t do your schoolwork.

And by the time you’re in 10th grade, you’re at the fourth grade level in that. Then we take these kids off and we put ’em in remedial math and we give them a worksheet packet. ’cause it’s easier for the school, it’s easier for the teachers. You give ’em a packet of worksheets, which they then don’t do. If you think that these kids are gonna do Khan Academy, they don’t do their schoolwork when they teacher is standing there right in front of them.

You think they’re gonna do it for some disembodied handwriting on a computer. People like me will do it. Like I do all kinds of LinkedIn learning courses. ’cause I’m super interested in AI and super interested in large learning models and super interested in tons of things. But the average kid’s not, can they do it?

So I’m in this alternative school and they’re saying, oh, you make educational games. This is an educational game our kids are doing, this is maybe a ninth or 10th grader who is very behind the mess. So I’m not making this up. They’re on this computer and there’s an alien. And go picture Alien. And then the thing comes up and it says, what is seven times nine?

And the kid types in 63 and the alien hits a golf ball that like sheets out. And then it comes up and it says, what is nine times four? And the kid types in 36, and the alien hits the golf ball. And I watch this for a little bit and I, this is not one of my more prized professional minutes, I just, it just comes out of me.

I said, “that looks boring as fuck.” And the kid says “It is.” So that is education. It is going over your multiplication tables, but it’s not very good education. It’s not very good game. Then you have, like I said, the coding ones where, move the turtle. See if you clicked here, the too will move there.

So you learn coding or. A lot of “shooting and” games they’re called like shooting and spelling shoot the correctly spelled word. And that’s not bad. Those things are not bad for young kids. There’s a certain amount of repetition you need, but you need to go beyond that. So what we do, so, and a lot of, and I don’t wanna ditch dis anybody ’cause some of these we’ve done white label games under contract for, but some of these companies.

They’re looking at how much kids play the game, right? So they will have games that have relatively little education in them where you go through this whole narrative and at the end of it, there might be a math question, or there’s a lot of, like I said, the shooting and things. If you get this math question right, then you cast a spell and that does something to the zombie that you’re trying to kill.

So again, that’s not bad. It’s basically an electronic version of flashcards. And I don’t know about you, but I think most of us use flashcards when our kids were little to teach ’em their multiplication tables and their math facts. But after a certain point, you need to go beyond that. And those games, here’s the kicker.

Those games are very expensive to make. The games like Spirit Lake, Fish Lake are very expensive to make. Okay. Because for everything that you do in a good game, you need to have, plus everything you do in good education. So for example, let’s start with Making Camp Navajo. For seventh graders, it’s teaching ratio proportion.

That’s what they learned in seventh grade. How do you make that interesting to Navajo kids who are very interested in sheep ranching? Well, one of the things about sheep ranching… we had Christie Hanson from the Navajo Nation was our game design on this. Christie knows more about sheep than any person I’ve ever met, and she’ll say, well, I don’t know very much about sheep.

And then she’ll go on to 50 different kinds of sheep and the different kinds of wool. I’m like, dude, something. I gotta meet somebody that you think knows a lot about sheep. So one of the things about sheep is where you really make your money is selling the lambs. I thought you make it from, wool, you make some money, but where you end up with a profit is from lambs.

And the better. Managed your flock is, the better fed they are, the better cared for they are, the higher the proportion of twin lambs. So obviously if you’re ewes are giving birth to twin lambs, that’s twice as much as if you’re having single ones. So this farm has, 12 ewes and six of them give birth to twins.

This farm or ranch, I guess it’s called has 21. Okay, and seven of them give birth to twins. Now is this far better because it had seven and this one had six? No,

Because this one is a one to three ratio. This one’s a one to two ratio. But then when you get that right, right after you get some of those problems, right, then there’s a game where you have to go and you catch the lambs and bottle feed them.

Joel: Right.

AnnMaria: So, they’re tied together, but not always so intricately. Or blue corn mush, which is a common thing that people would make on the Navajo Nation and that, so this. There’s a little visual novel and this girl is saying, “yeah, both my grandmothers have blue corn mursh recipes. And whenever one of ’em says, which one do you like better?

I say, yours, of course. And here’s my one grandmother’s recipe, and I’m gonna use this. It’s for 12 people, but I only have four people coming over. Let me know what the recipe is.” And so it’s actually applied in ways that kids can see, they can use it in their life.

Joel: Wow. And at the same time you’re tackling some of the cultural exposure and you’re showing the kids people that look like them and stories that relate to them. That is. So, so really you, you went back to that initial, original problem and you’ve almost doubled the time. What you’ve invented as a time machine.

AnnMaria: That is exactly it. So after the pandemic, right? My, my brother teaches math and he says, to me AnnMaria, “they’re telling us we need to bring up the kids. S for a year and a half, two years, every year to compensate for this pandemic learning loss.” He said, if “I could bring every kid up two years in grade level in math and a year, I would have been doing that my entire career.

I would wait for pandemic to do it.” So how do you do it? And the answer is exactly what you said. If you can teach his math and history class. If you could teach math in music class, we have a game, All That Jazz Math where it again, looks at ratios and looks at the number of beats per note, right? An eighth note, a quarter note, and so on.

And it’s in music class. If you can teach math and music class in history, class, then, oh my gosh, we, one of my favorite activities is math and PE. I love this. And this was in Chile where it gets really hot in the summer sometimes. And they were having classes in some summer school camp for kids.

We do an an augmented reality app. You can get it on the app store or Google Play for teaching, just your basic math skills in English or Spanish. So you can click on the card and it will tell you either in English or in Spanish what the, you know what it is, like three times five is 15 . So what they did is they took the little cards that you have to hold the phone over and they hid them all around the school.

And the kids had so many, ’cause they were doing it indoors ’cause it was so hot outside. And so the kids had like 15 minutes to run all the way around the school. So they had a worksheet they had run all the way around the school, find all the cards hold the phone over it, get the right answer and then fill it out.

So there’s another one with we just did this game funded with the Library of Congress. And I should mention that anybody who’s listening, if they would like to design games for, we have another cohort coming up. This will be our third and last one in this grant that’s funded through the Library of Congress teaching primary sources.

And we get with groups of educators and people in the community are interested in designing a game. And we come up with a game design and then we make it. And so the first one we did was our Native American veteran. 

And there’s a whole lesson plan they did about this veteran Joseph Oklahombi, who was the most decorated Native American during World War I.

And one of the things he did was run through like 220 yards under fire, jumped into a machine gun nest, took the Germans machine gun, turned it on them, took them over. Then the group of 23 soldiers who were following him, they took over another machine gun nest. And between the them, these 24 guys captured 171 German soldiers and killed 78.

So in PE class, so they did this as a whole project. In PE class, they have to run 220 yards with a backpack on ’em and jump over obstacles like they would have. And then in math class, they’re doing a ratio, like what’s the ratio of. The number of people they captured compared to the number of soldiers there were.

What’s the ratio of the total they captured and killed compared to the soldiers they were And in English class, they’re writing, and this is an actual thing, they’re try, people are trying to get Joseph Oklahombi that I think it’s congressional medal out or posthumously, which is not often done, but is sometimes done.

And so then the students write up a letter justifying this based on what they’ve seen about, the ratios and that. So those kind of things. Are real life applications. And if you are a Native American kid who’s, especially if you’re Choctaw, which is what Oklahombi was, but even if you’re not, even if you are a native, a Dakota kid from North Dakota, you look at this and think, Hey, that’s right. That guy should get recognized. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re doing. 

The new one we’re doing now is on Lewis and Clark Expedition from multiple perspectives and having worked on reservations for decades when the teacher said they wanted to do well, it’s not strategic. When people said they wanna do Lewis and Clark, I was like, “mmm, I dunno about that.” But they wanted to do like one from Lewis’s perspective as the person who is discovering all these new plants and animals and writing about them.

One from Clark’s perspective, who’s the cartographer? One from Sacagawea’s perspective, one from the Hidatsa. Like I’m here farming. Right? The Hidatsa. Were massively successful farmers. “I’m here raising my corn and beans and squash. These guys show up.” And one from the Dakota perspective on the medicinal plants they used. 

“and yeah. And this woman Sacagawea, she was really sick and they didn’t know what to do. And I said, well, this is what we use.”

And anyway, so that’s what we’re doing now. And the third cohort starts April 25th. People can come in person. It will be right before the Minot State Powwow. So we’re doing a workshop and then right after that, we go to the Grand Entry. Anybody can come to the Powwow. So that’s what we’re doing. We can cover their lodging up in North Dakota for the night. We can cover part of their expenses to drive up there or fly up there if anybody is interested in doing it and being part of it. And then the rest of the workshop, there’s three of them.

The rest of them are online. And if they can’t make it to North Dakota, they really wanna do it, like one of the people in the current cohort is from Hawaii and we’re doing a second mini game with him, which is about his great-great-great something grandfather who was Cherokee, who hopped on a sc.. a whaling schooner, and traveled to Hawaii and met a native Hawaii woman and married her and became a fairly successful, I dunno, they were quite a shipping magnate, but owned a whaling ship.

So we think of Native Americans as. The people who were being met with by the explorers and not the people who were the explorers. So yeah, always lots of things happening. And I haven’t even told you the newest thing we’re doing.

Joel: Oh, that’s, that is, it is just so cool. How, I, when I first saw, I was like, oh, they’re math games. That’s interesting. And, but the multi-layers, and I think that’s what makes this so interesting is from a technical communication standpoint. 

And again, I work with a lot of professional businesses and B2B startups and things like that. And they always seem to be stuck in the nuts and bolts. I’ve got this, this pyramid concept. I stole it from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but he stole it from the Blackfeet Native Americans anyway, so I don’t feel so bad about stealing it back that they’re all stuck down here in the nuts and bolts and they don’t ever make the connections to bigger ideas and and the stories and those emotional appeals.

And it, I, it takes a lot of work to make these games, as you said, but it doesn’t take. A whole lot to make the connections if you have your eyes open to it.

AnnMaria: And that the things that are taking a whole lot of work to make the games, that’s the new thing we’re working on. So first of all, anybody who’s listening wants us to make a game for them, that’s generally what we do. I schools have very little money a lot of people who have gotten broke trying to sell to schools.

What we generally do is we will get a contract with someone like the Library of Congress or the Thunder Valley Education Cooperative at Pine Ridge. Some organization that wants us, we’re doing one with Dream in Green right now out of Miami, Florida to do games on cleaning the environment. So I’m pretty excited about that.

So we will work with an organization wants us to make a game. We will make the game, and then they use it to teach whatever it is they wanna teach out in the world.

So, one reason is working with a lot of indigenous nations. I’m never gonna be that person that’s making gaming in Dakota and then selling it back to The Dakota.

That’s just not gonna be me. But if the Dakota want a game, I will give them a better price than anybody can get to make a game, and then they can use it to teach their language. So that’s what we do. We, like I said, we’re doing one for dreaming, two for Dream in Green now. We are doing three for the Library of Congress.

So if somebody has an idea that you want to teach anything to anybody, that you hit me up that the other thing. So years ago this friend, this very wonderful woman, I know Melissa. Invited me to the upper Nicola Valley in British Columbia. She’s First Nations. So to get the upper Nicola Valley, you fly into Edmond Alberta, then you fly to Kamloops, then Melissa picks you up and drives you three and a half hours, the upper Nicola Valley. And it’s very beautiful.

So I’m speaking at this conference and how we can use games to, to teach indigenous languages and to maintain indigenous languages. Christy Hanson, again has this beautiful quote . She’s Navajo and she said , “our language will not survive unless our children use it while they’re playing.”

And so Melissa says to me, can you wait after the conference? ’cause these people from way up North wanna speak with you. And I’m thinking, dude, I took two planes and drove three and a half hours to get to you were way up north. But anyway, they come in, these one, these people teach the indigenous language and they wanted a game on it.

But they’re from a community of like 2000 people. And initially when we started making games, it would take about eight months, three developers to make Spirit Lake or Fish Lake, and you can still find them on the Microsoft store, on on the app store. Now we’ve gone more towards Chromebook games, but it would take us like three developers, eight months, and you just cannot do that for a community of 2000 people.

It’s not cost effective. And I felt bad about it and I thought about this for a very long time. And over the years we have worked and worked on making it easier to make games. So we have two things. One’s available right now. Anybody listening, if they wanna send me an email, I will I will hook ’em up.

We have a game builder where if you’ve had one class in JavaScript, maybe even not any, if you know a little bit about object oriented programming, you can make educational games. We set it up that there are, it’s set up in blocks. You want a visual novel. You go in here and you type in the line of text that you want on it.

You click here the image you want on it. If you want a voiceover, you record the voiceover and you click the link here. So we’ve been able to reduce down from three developers taking eight months, one developer doing it in six weeks.

Joel: Wow.

AnnMaria: And it doesn’t have to be now, it can’t be an 8-year-old kid that took a coding class, quote unquote.

And what I always tell people is, if you wanna figure out if the intern or the person in your commu your office has the adequate technical skills to do this, ask them what IDE they use. And if they give you any answer other than “what’s an IDE?”, they can do it. You could do it without an id, but it would just be way more difficult.

But yeah, you go and you download files, you unzip them, you make a copy, and you go in your IDE and you start just typing in thing and linking images images. And it even comes. We’re working on, we have a lot of artwork. We’re working on putting that more organized. So that’s done. You can have it today. The other thing that we’re working on.

At this moment is a game builder that you don’t need to know any coding, that basically WordPress for educational games and that we expect to be done. We have a prototype that’s very skeletal, so anybody wants to comply with that, but we expect to have a fairly good MVP in the next three months.

Joel: Wow. And that is gonna change so many businesses and so many teachers and communities. I think experiential games is really, they say video’s taking over and video is, are very passive. I’ll admit, I’m a I’m stuck in TikTok for several hours a day. I, but as I’m reading the news, right, that’s what I, that’s how I, that’s how I play it off, but it’s very passive.

And but giving something that somebody can interact with. I have my cards that I use in my workshop. I’m trying to, I will hit you up to test this out ’cause maybe I can build something, I can build something with my cards to, to put it more in people’s digital hands. 

The experience, I think is what changes reflecting somebody else’s lived experience, showing someone another possibility or letting them get their hands in and do it for themselves. 

I’m gonna stick my nose in here just a second before we get back to this conversation. with a really exciting announcement. My book, Be a Nerd That Talks Good will be coming out in the next couple months. It’s finally gone to copyedit and design and layout. And so what I need now is people in my Book Army. If you’re interested in reading the book, getting an early copy of it let me know, please go to nerdthattalksgood.com/book and, uh, sign up and I will be in touch. Uh, all that I ask for you is that when the book launches, you prepare, uh, an amazing review. There will be some special treats and some special, uh, offers for people who buy the book, so stay tuned.

Again, that’s nerdthattalksgood.com/book and back to this amazing conversation with AnneMaria.

You’ve reinvented yourself so many times. You’ve got your hands in so many incredible rich pots.

Do you do non-work? What did, do you have the thing that keeps you fresh or keeps you invigorated or are you the type of person that it work is play and play is work and there’s no line between the two?

AnnMaria: My children often joke about my idea of vacation as a laptop with a view. And they have also often said that if I ever write my autobiography, the title will be, “I was out of town at the time” because so many of my stories start that way. 

“Well, Maria, she hurt her knee during the state track finals.”

“Well, I was out of town at the time.”

But I travel a lot. I travel a lot. I have worked in, I was part of Startup Chile. Anybody’s interested in Startup Chile, so totally recommend. It was a great experience. I was there for a year. I have worked in Chile, in the Dominican Republic, in The Bahamas on a cruise, so I travel a lot, but because I have a job where I can work anywhere I take my laptop with me and do work anywhere.

I think that is my secret to not being stressed too. These days you see a lot of people get upset about, oh, I had to wait at Starbucks, or My flight was delayed. No, I have, a MacBook. I have an iPad with a keyboard. I have my phone and wherever I am, if I’m delayed, I can go in a corner and work. So I don’t really that’s a thing I have struggled with.

Now I have four kids and nine grandkids, so I do spend time with my family. But when I have talked about retirement, I don’t know what I would do. I did judo. I taught judo for 50 years, and now I don’t teach so much. I think. At some point you need to step out and let the younger people do it, but I, yeah, I don’t, I, and I’ve done a lot of those things that people do in retirement, right?

Like for the last 30 years I was professor full-time for seven years. I was up for, I was associate professor and I left the year I would’ve become full professor. Instead, I bounced to California and started a company. So I was professor and then for the last 20 plus years I’ve been an adjunct professor at Loyola Mary Mountain and Pepperdine, and now National University.

So I’ve done that. I published a lot of scientific articles. I published a book on judo called Winning on the Ground . So I’ve done a lot of those things that people do in retirement. I was president of National Judo Organization, I’m now, I was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to the California State Athletic Commission.

So I’m on that now. So a lot of that stuff people do in the retirement have already done. I. Well, I, that’s probably why I haven’t retired. I have no idea what I would do. think I’m gonna, I don’t think I’m gonna learn to knit.

Joel: I’ve heard a lot of people say the secret to staying young is starting retirement early and just having little pieces of it, while you keep yourself going and active and, yeah. My, my dad retired from the Air Force after 37 years, and my mom said he roamed the house like a caged animal until he discovered woodworking.

That, that’s his big hobby and fly fishing now. So, those are two are available to you if you’re looking for something else.

AnnMaria: Uh, well, one of my friends commented, if you retired, maybe what you could do is just not have the meetings with clients and not have to fill out the reports to agencies and you could just work on games that you’re interested in.

Joel: Yeah.

AnnMaria: And that’s the other thing, I’m, I, all of my interests are not so much like the embroidery type or fly fishing.

I’m very interested in AI. Google has this Google Startup school, so I’ve taken a couple of courses in that. I am always trying to build up my programming skills. I am always looking at more things that we could do to, right. Right now I’m just started, really just started a YouTube Channel for our 7 Gen Blocks the game builder for developers, because that’s gonna be key.

So yeah, there’s just so many things around programming and education, math education I’m interested in, and every year I say I’m gonna do less. Like I always say, I’m not gonna teach epidemiology again this year, but then somehow I do.

Joel: Well, I will certainly include links to the company and any other, to the YouTube Channel. Get, some people watching that, and people who want to reach out to you. How else can people keep tabs on you or connect? What’s the best way?

AnnMaria: Well, I’ve been cutting down on my social media ’cause a lot of it’s just people hollering at each other. So, LinkedIn really, you’ll find me on LinkedIn or BlueSky pretty much only those two places. I do have an Instagram account that I’m at sometimes. That is mostly things of, boxing MMA fights where mine there, part of the commission or my lovely children, but anything about our company, you’ll find on LinkedIn or our company website, 7generationgames.com. There’s also growingmath.org, which is where we have a bunch of lessons on teaching math I teacher and yeah,

Joel: Well, I am excited to see what is coming out next, because I mean it, like, like you say, you always say you wanna do something less, less, but then something I, it is shiny object syndrome. I know I have the same thing. 

This has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me.

I don’t know what to say. I’m excited to start learning some math stuff and I don’t say that very lightly, so 

AnnMaria: Well, I wanna see what game you’re gonna come up with.

Joel: All right, well, we will talk about that. And I, and I mentioned before, I have several people that I already know I’m gonna introduce you to. The Venn diagrams just keep getting closer and closer.

So thank you for joining.

AnnMaria: All right, well, it was nice to talk with you. I’ll be a GDC and A-S-U-G-S-V and TEDx Fargo. So all those things are coming up.

Joel: Awesome. Thank you.

AnnMaria: Okay. Talk to you later. Bye.