The Eccentric CEO Podcast

Fixing America's Math Grades with Video Games — Dr. AnnMaria De Mars

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Today's guest is a tough, tough badass — in the realest definition of the word.

She was the first American to win the Judo world championship (1984) — which involved coming out on top over her Japanese, Korean, and Eastern European counterparts, who trained full-time as professional athletes — while she had a full-time job as an industrial engineer, a baby daughter, and... get this... a non-functional leg that had been operated upon.

Fast forward to today, she's on a crusade to improve the way math and sciences are taught to kids in the USA (and beyond).

Only 25% of people who graduate from high school in the USA are considered "proficient" in math — a surprisingly large number have trouble even doing basic multiplication and division. And the standards are still going down — the average kid would have easily flunked 10 years ago for what they get As and Bs today.

But as it turns out, the American schooling system is quite complicated. Every state has their own rules, and so does every district.

So how do you build a profitable, mission-driven company in a highly regulated, chaotic industry (filled with bureaucrats on top) where every penny is hard to squeeze, and kids are involved?

And how do you do it while making it "harder" (devoting a significant amount of resources on reforming low-income districts who need it the most — but which most ed-tech companies ignore)?

Well, I guess you just go ahead and do it.

Dr. De Mars is the Founder and President of 7 Generation Games, which has solved a multitude of problems one at a time:

  1. First, building a smashing product that kids, teachers, and parents unanimously love. Her company makes interactive video games that use real-world, culturally rich problem examples (from the life of an Aztec diplomat, or a Sioux hunter, or fisherman, etc) to teach math — raising average grades by a 30%.
  2. Second, they solved distribution — taking the games both directly to consumers, as well as building a partnership/B2B channel such that schools can deploy them for every student en mass, and using an innovative mix of private and public funding to finance it.
  3. Third, they also built the software platforms needed to churn out high-quality educational games in quick succession, in any language — enabling them to both move faster and scale at the same time.

    4. In this episode, we discuss:

    •  There's a Judoka who's never been injured??!
    • The REAL problem with math education in the USA, and how to fix it
    • Why focusing on affluent kids is, counter-intuitively, a bad business decision
    • Competing with the Microsofts and Pearsons of the education industry
    • Where does most ed-tech funding go?
    • Why most "math games" don't actually teach you math
    • Their big fight with Apple about... the Aztec smallpox pandemic?
    • Building the "Wordpress for educational games"

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      ...more
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      The Eccentric CEO PodcastBy Aman Y. Agarwal