What did I learn in Chile?

You’d certainly hope after seven months in Chile I would have learned something, right?

In fact, I think I’ve gained both professionally and personally. Life is lived forwards but understood backwards. For example, I never knew when I was training for the world championships that it would prepare me for the long haul of building a company.

I’m sure that some of what I’ve learned here will only be evident in hindsight, but here is what I can say right now.

I better understand the needs of rural communities. You might think after all of those years of living and working in North Dakota, that would be a no-brainer.

Working with the schools in Tomé, it became abundantly clear that we needed games that worked offline. You may think this is unnecessary and every school has reliable internet and every kid has a cell phone with an unlimited data plan.

A. You’re wrong and B. If they do have a limited data plan, they don’t want to use their data for anything related to school or education. They want to use it to text their friends and post on social media.

I realized the assumption that people always have Internet access is stupid

So, we modified first one game to run off line and it was so much more convenient in schools without wifi, in urban schools with unbearably slow wifi, on the subway, for demos where we didn’t have the school password and our cell phones didn’t…