Update: Our project was funded! Thanks to all those who participated.

I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about a subject that is somewhat off topic for the Fractal Domains site. (However, I will have a comment that will bring it back to relevancy at the end of this post!)

Last year my wife and I, along with some other partners, embarked on a project to develop the prototype of an educational game and to test it with a group of subjects. The game has the dual goal of teaching mathematics and teaching cultural history to Native American students at the fourth, fifth and sixth grade levels.

This year we are embarking on the second phase of development of this game. Part of that is a Kickstarter program to help raise funding for this phase of development. I invite you, if interested, to go to our Kickstarter page and consider becoming a backer.

Of course, the entire area of educational games is pretty large. Instead of going into detail here about what makes this particular game unique, I will refer you to our web site 7 Generation Games which contains the pertinent details.

Also, I invite you to read my wife’s latest blog post on the subject of the start-up. She is a much more interesting writer than I am!

Last year, when I retired, I was looking forward to having plenty of time to work on Fractal Domains, which had been in a state of neglect for a few years. However, when the opportunity to work on this game came up, Fractal Domains once again was pushed to the margins.

I did learn a lot in the process of working on this game. My professional career was writing software for engineering purposes (mostly embedded and simulation software using Fortran, Ada, C and C++). The game required me to get up to speed on a whole panoply of languages and technologies: C# and Javascript (for game scripting), 3D modeling, HTML5, interfacing with MySQL databases, and more. It was a great opportunity, and I am looking forwards to extending my experience and abilities further this year.

However, I did find some time in the past few months to make some progress on the successor to Fractal Domains (see this post for an update). I hope to find time this year to publish what I hope will be the first of a long succession of Fractal Domains enhancements. I daresay that if this Kickstarter campaign is successful, we may have some money to hire people more experienced that I in some of the aforementioned technologies, which may help us complete some of our goals more quickly — and may free up some of my time to do more work on Fractal Domains!