19-Year-Old Frater Launches Educational Networking Web Site
Frater Aseem Badshah (Chi, Univ. of Washington) is itching for an education revolution. The restless 19-year-old wunderkid, who has been tagged by some technology pundits as a young entrepreneur to watch, says he's made the first step with Scriptovia.com.
Even if you haven't heard of the document-sharing site yet, chances are college and high-school-age children know all about it. Scriptovia, which was launched in May, is an interactive networking site that enables students to post their schoolwork online, providing "inspiration" and ideas to other students. The posted materials are part of a growing storehouse of more than 2,000 reports that cover everything from literature to science to history. The site also lets students critique the posted materials.
"We want to be the portal that all students log onto every night before they start their homework," says Frater Badshah, a sophomore at Washington. "We want to help students connect with a community."
Frater Badshah, who started the site using his own money and the financial backing from family and friends, dismisses the claim that Scriptovia is an "essay mill," where students can copy the work of others. He says the site uses technology to deter cheating and that there are plenty of online tools teachers can use to determine the originality of an essay.
Besides, Scriptovia is just the beginning for the fledgling company. Frater Badshah, a former Microsoft consultant, envisions his portal as a digital tool to help move the educational system away from rote memorization of facts and figures, and toward analysis and interpretation of information. He hopes it will also help schools adopt modern technologies that are more relevant to a student's future.
Says Badshah, "Schools need to be brought into the 21st century."
More about Scriptovia
Scriptovia.com is a new web site that is dedicated to help students learn from each other through collaboration and sharing. Basically, Scriptovia is a Web 2.0 application that will allow students to share academic documents in an online community, much like YouTube to video or Flickr to photos. Students will be able to look at other students' schoolwork in order to use an example to do their own assignments. For example, a student can look at another student's essay to see how it was structured, what resources were used, and get topic ideas, or students who are in similar classes can share notes. Students will also be able to post their own documents in order to get a constant flow of feedback from fellow students in the community. The site will give students an opportunity to work in a collaborative environment much like adults in the 21st century workplace, while helping them to identify where the line is between collaboration and plagiarism.
The Mission is to increase students' productivity and depth of learning by providing them with a means to learn, share, and collaborate with fellow students in a virtual environment. They would like to see Scriptovia become the number one online education portal, the website that every student comes to before they start their schoolwork for the night.
Meet Frater Aseem Badshah, President and Founder
Frater Aseem is currently a sophomore at the University of Washington studying business administration. He previously founded ThinkEssay.com, the proof of concept for Scriptovia.com. In addition, Badshah worked as a high school intern and consultant with Microsoft Corporation for more than a year. At Microsoft, he was a program manager developing internal tools, as well as program manager and marketer for a project called Scenario Voting - a tool that allowed the Windows Vista test team to collect satisfaction data from the millions of beta testers.
Adapted from Seattle Business Monthly and Scriptovia.com. If you would like to see your chapter news here, contact Communications Coordinator Tom McAninch.