1/27/2015 Susan Mumm, Media Specialist
Written by Susan Mumm, Media Specialist
“I tutor at Grainger (Engineering Library), and that’s one of the things I would always do when students would come in with questions,” said the senior from Riverside, Illinois. “I would ask, ‘Have you drawn the picture, do you know what this looks like?’”
Dluhy has created an interactive website that integrates various visualization tools with mathematics problems. For example, when an equation is entered, a plot is shown on an adjacent grid, then the object is rotated to show how the shape would appear in three dimensions. Dluhy hopes to market the site to students who need the additional resource, and to teachers who could use it to create content for their students.
He believes future concepts such as Higher Ed could become the preferred method for teaching mathematics to high school and undergraduate students.
“As far as calculus goes, I don’t see textbooks being useful. They’re good for samples, homework problems and pictures, but I don’t know whether I’ve encountered a single student that’s read a calculus textbook all the way through.”
Dluhy has been working up to eight hours a week since October on the startup, which was selected among the 64 college student companies chosen for Student Startup Madness (SSM). Anchor universities in regions across the country, as well as corporate sponsors invested in American entrepreneurship and innovation on college campuses, support SSM.
HigherEd did not reach SSM’s round of 32, but Dluhy does plan to enter the startup in the Cozad New Venture Competition, sponsored by the Engineering at Illinois Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC).
Dluhy acquired many of the skills he needed to develop the website through his summer internship with SpiceWorks in Austin, Texas. The company creates applications to help information technology professionals manage networks. From that experience, Dluhy gained mentors and became aware of best practices.
He was among a group of students chosen for TEC’s Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship Workshop in Spring 2014, and last fall participated in a bootcamp hosted by Founders, a student entrepreneurship organization affiliated with TEC. Through Founders, Dluhy gained a year’s free server space on Rackspace, a managed cloud company, as well as a stipend to acquire a domain name and security certificate for HigherEd.
Dluhy also gained experience and knowledge by building the website for the student organization, Illinois Robotics in Space, and by taking a hypergraphics course taught by Prof. George Francis in the Mathematics Department.
AE Associate Prof. Tim Bretl also inspired Dluhy. “We had a lot of talks about education and how students learn and the best way to teach,” he said.