Three brothers and a sister in a Fort Wayne family, all students at Indiana Tech, are an internship unto themselves. They began work last fall on a package of design and animation software that they hope will allow children and teenagers to collaborate on educational video projects powered by their imaginations and broadband Internet connections.
The Dugan siblings – Sean, 23; Jared, 22; Alyssa, 20; and Tristan, 18 – are juniors and seniors at Indiana Tech. Seniors Jared and Sean major in software engineering, and juniors Alyssa and Tristan major in education. Now they hope a promotional video they produced will earn them seed money for the Forge software they're working on.
While many college students were scraping together cash for Florida getaways during spring break, the Dugans were busy in the basement of the family home near Snider High School. They covered part of the walls and floor with green plastic to create a green screen – a background that can be blocked out to merge live-action video with animation. Then they filmed themselves narrating and acting in a video introduction to Forge.
What is Forge? The business plan for their company, Honor Education, sums it up: “Honor Education seeks to create a software environment where students can build together, play together and learn together in virtual worlds of their own design. This can be used in a formal classroom setting, an after-school program or at home. Students can work individually or collaborate in group projects.”
Forge builds on a foundation of openly shared design and editing software available online to create a more accessible, powerful and easy-to-learn package of tools. As the Dugans explain it, Forge will enable even young children to enjoy the creative and artistic power of modeling, animation and visual animation in two and three dimensions.
Collaborating in video is nothing new for the four Dugans, the oldest of eight children. They were home-schooled, which has frequently enabled them to learn through unconventional projects they've created on their own. Plenty of young people have made their own movies for decades, but playing with video today naturally bleeds into experimenting with computer effects, animation, three-dimensional modeling and other leaps far beyond the Super 8 film that once captured students clowning around with movies.
The Dugans made their video as an entry in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's “I Am Free Enterprise” video contest, which offers a top prize of $50,000. Win or lose, they have a plan for moving Forge toward sales, probably sometime in 2011.
“We plan to do beta-testing with classes next fall,” Jared Dugan said. Drawing on their own experience with the more-flexible curriculum of home-schooling, they expect home-schooled students will comprise the beta-testing classes next fall.
Steve Franks, Student Ventures Lab program manager at the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center, is helping the Dugans. He's impressed by the varied talents and skills of the Dugan team, assets that give them a considerable edge over many young entrepreneurs. |