Brown Elementary has founded its own start-up company called “Project Freedom”. The company is led by CTO (Chief Technology Officer)
Dr. Darko and CEO (Chief Executive office) Ms. Catherine Sarenac and currently has 14 employees. The student employees range from third to fifth graders who were selected for their achievements in math and science and/or for their aptitude in computer science. The company is working in collaboration with renowned Jackson Design firm NunoErin to create a video game concept for touch sensitive/tactile tables at a local McDonald’s restaurant.
Day 1 - Students get an overview of the project and read over their contracts. The CEO explains their roles and responsibilities and the meaning of an at-will contract.  Day 4 - Using Scratch via Google’s CS First platform, Dr. Darko introduces the students to event based programming. Today they are learning basic concepts like how to move their characters (sprite), how to add sound and how to create loops in a sports related game.  Day 8 - Project Freedom team hosts its first Skype conference call with the design and product team at GrabCAD. The discussion was focused on the design process and included questions about beta testing, iterating on good ideas, and discarding bad ideas even when you love them.  Day 8 continued - Students left for Thanksgiving break with beautiful sketch pads from the NunoErin team to be filled with great inspiration.  | Day 3 - Nuno Gonçalves Ferreira and Erin Haynes of the NunoErin duo join the Project Freedom team to begin the brainstorming process. Using a mock-up concept, Nuno talks about different aspects of the game.   Day 9 - Using the engineering design process, the students began the design phase of their video game. The focus of the day’s process was the initial ASK step. Students brainstormed parameters, constraints and other design aspects such as: how would a player exit the game, how many players could play the game, who might be female characters, how long would one game end, how would players lose or win the game.   |