February 14, 2000

Genie Davis
University of Alabama
New College
P.O. Box 870182
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0182

Genie,

This is a sketch of the interactive website you and I previously discussed for a possible senior project. I am also considering it for either a commercial venture or as part of a consortia with the school system(s). In any case, the ideas contained herein are confidential and proprietary, all rights reserved.

The working title is Originami. It is a website for classrooms\kids who’s goal is to bring excitement to the educational Internet experience. It includes the following features:

• Interactive collaborative storytelling, wherein one classroom begins a multimedia story, then invites one or more classrooms across the world to continue the story. Stories would be at different grade levels; perhaps with younger kids building their stories by clicking, dragging and dropping, older kids writing\designing their own. Story additions could be submitted to a voting process to third part classrooms, thus enlivening the process.
• Challenges and tournaments for other classroom subjects, math, science, history, etc.
• TeachersPet mascot - they create their own.
• Email & pen-pals
• Links and resources to educational-informational resources in the Internet for students to do research.
• International registry of school & classrooms on the web. The world wide scope of the site would naturally promote multi-lingual skills and international socialization.

There has been much hype about the Internet connecting the world. This does it. Watching my own kids, its easy to see that they like games, challenges, novelty, interactivity, and social contact. The mission of this site is to provoke interest, induce excitement, create an attractiveness that draws kids to the site. There are already many educational and children’s sites on the Internet. Most of them fail to achieve the level of student interest and involvement for which I am aiming.

Ideally, this project would be done in conjunction with Education and Computer Science, and any other University resources we could muster, such as graphic artists, musicians. Also ideally, I envision a consortia of my private enterprise and public institutions that apply for federal funding, thus opening this web site to all schools, not just those that subscribe.

Time is of the essence. I want to submit this for the March 1, 2000 deadline.