Elon senior Trevor Nelson won third place in the “2 Minutes to Win It” business idea contest sponsored by the N.C. Entrepreneurship Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on Nov. 15.
Seventy-six students from local universities participated in the contest, which tasked students to develop and pitch original ideas for any type of business or social entrepreneurship venture to a panel of judges.
Nelson’s idea, First Person Immersion, involved using educational video games to teach users a foreign language and culture. “Players will complete missions throughout a digital foreign city to learn the language as any native speaker would – by experiencing it,” Nelson said. “This immersive atmosphere will increase the rate at which people learn languages.”
Nelson began developing his concept after participating in Assistant Professor David Neville’s experiment on a 3D digital game-based language learning (3D-DGBLL) environment Neville created. Nelson, who was in Neville’s Introductory German II class last spring, felt this gaming technology could be used to help him, as well as others, learn foreign languages more effectively.
In preparing for the contest, Nelson, who is studying entrepreneurship in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, sought feedback on his concept and business model from professors, mentors and students in his New Venture Planning class, and noted fellow entrepreneurship students Emma Price ’13 and Oliver Goddu ‘13 were especially helpful and supportive.
Nelson said he plans to continue developing his venture, which he believes will “revolutionize the way we learn languages and a host of many other difficult subjects.”