The First Workshop is Over but You Can Still Join Us

On August 2nd, Professors Juliana Taken Alive and Annmaria De Mars led an online workshop on an introduction to primary sources available from the Library of Congress, with educators from North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado and California. You can see a rough draft of the game we designed here. We started with the introduction to what are primary sources and a module on Native American veterans of World War I.

You can play the game online here.

We will continue working on it during the workshop at Fort Yates in October.

That’s great but what if I missed the online workshop?

You’re not alone. Some of the educators who signed up had technical difficulty. We know how unreliable Internet can be in some places.

Sign up on this Google form

Not Sure? Check out the first workshop

You can see the play list with videos from the first workshop here.

Next workshop dates

• October 5, 2024 – Fort Yates, ND – 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Lunch and mileage reimbursement provided. Lodging funded for those more than 60 miles from Fort Yates who have completed workshop one and assignments.
• December 9 – Online, 6-8 pm Central time

Educators who attend and complete the assignments – lessons you can use in your class because we are all about hands on and being practical – can receive one graduate or undergraduate credit from Sitting Bull College or Minot State University.

You keep mentioning assignments. What are those assignments?

After you have completed workshop one, either the Zoom meeting or the recorded version, you need to complete the following assignments:

• Visit getting started with primary sources
• Sign up for Teaching with Primary Sources Teachers network
  • Visit free to use and reuse sets and post review of one set to TPS network. Email link of your post to the instructor.

We’ll send you more information on the assignments for the remaining two workshops when we receive your sign-up form.

We’re very excited to announce that 7 Generation Games has received a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary sources program. We will work with educators to create games and lessons teaching Indigenous and rural history using primary sources. Of course, if these lessons included math or science, we would be thrilled. Educators will work with facilitators, Professors Annmaria De Mars, Juliana Taken Alive and Dan Conn in a series of three workshops, two create game designs and lessons using those games.

Games will then be created by 7 Generation Games. Participants receive credit from Sitting Bull College.

Image is Tex Northrup, a Paiute rancher, from Library of Congress collection

The first cohort will give priority to teachers from North and South Dakota and kicks off with an online meeting August 2nd – Did you miss the August 2nd session? You can still sign up. Learn about upcoming sessions and how you can get involved here.

For more information, and to apply, see the post Co-designing Games to Teach with Primary Sources from Indigenous and Rural History or just

Go to the application form to sign up.

Over the past few years, we have interviewed hundreds of teachers, principals, after-school staff and other experts in education – 100% cited maintaining student attention as a challenge. Across the classes we observed and teachers we interviewed, from Title I schools, from 15-50% of students were not turning in their work. 

To help catch student attention, either at the beginning of a lesson, or to apply a concept as attention starts to wane, we’re building a series of “Warm-up Games” that can be played on a Chromebook.

Our first five warm-up games all take less than 10 minutes, from beginning to end. These include games in Spanish and English, cross-curricular games with math and music or science and a game to teach history and music vocabulary.

Bake-a-palooza – Dividing unit fractions by integer – PLAY GAME

Bake-a-palooza Español – Spanish version of Bake-a-palooza – PLAY GAME

Minnesota Turtles – Concepts of indigenous and endangered species and converting fractions to decimals. – PLAY GAME

All That Math Jazz – Jazz history and using ratios. – PLAY GAME

All That Jazz Music – Jazz history and music vocabulary – PLAY GAME

Wondering How You’d Use These Games?

Check out one option in the All that Math Jazz lesson by Isabel Bozada-Jones of Ohio. Like Isabel, we’ve often found that students are more interested in math when they can see its application to other subjects.

Our game catalog is growing – and still free

Like us, you’ve probably seen a lot of grant-funded programs disappear once the grant ended. We’re proud to say that, through a combination of public and private funding, we’ve gone from 10 Chromebook games at the end of the Growing Math project to 17 today. You can find the list, math and other content taught and links to play here. 

Within the next few months, we’ll have at least two more warm-up games and two longer games released, one of which is bilingual in Spanish and English. 

Thanks to the SciTech Minnesota program, we’ve been able to add two software developer interns. Thanks to the Center for Economic Inclusion, we’ve been able to hire a Business Development Specialist, freeing up AnnMaria’s time to focus on software development. What this means for you is that a couple of the games that have been in beta will have their final (fingers-crossed) bug-free release, and every game in our catalog will be receiving an update over the next several months.

We Love to Hear from You

As always, we are happy to hear feedback on our games, bugs (gasp), suggested enhancements, lesson ideas or just good jokes.

You can follow us on Instagram @7gengames , find us on LinkedIn or Facebook.