It was 3 a.m. in Beijing, and Nicholas Winter was entranced by a video game.
He was supposed to be sleeping. He had an early flight back to the United States after months of traveling and studying in China.
Instead, Winter, then a junior at Oberlin College, was fascinated by Trauma Center: Under the Knife, a game on the Nintendo DS system that uses a stylus and touch screen to perform medical procedures.
“The game is crazy,” Winter recalls. “You’re a surgeon who is also a ninja, and you perform combat surgery. The game plays with little strokes that appear on the screen, and you hit them with the stylus really quickly.”
The game’s movements got Winter thinking:What if you could learn Chinese characters like that? Just months before, Winter and his friend George Saines decided to start a business together — if they could find an idea that “didn’t suck.”
Not long after, Winter pitched the idea to Saines (who admitted the concept didn’t suck). Winter’s senior honors project — a Chinese handwriting recognition program — eventually became Skritter, a Web-based application that helps students learn the thousands of characters in the Chinese written language. They named their company Inkren — a nod to the ink traditionally used to make characters and “ren,” the Chinese word for person.
Currently, a beta version of Skritter is free and available at skritter.com. Once a user creates a profile at the site, he then can choose from several different vocabulary words, including simplified and traditional Chinese characters. The practice screen includes the Chinese word and its English translation, as well as a sound clip that can be played to hear it spoken. The user then makes strokes with the mouse to create the characters. Skritter records whether the stroke was made in the right direction and offers hints at the next stroke when it senses someone struggling. To increase retention rates, an algorithm tracks what users learn and forget.
The Web site has about 550 registered users to date, with more signing up every day, Saines says. Once the application is completed, Inkren will release a full version and charge subscriptions. They are also looking into licensing Skritter with other programs, Saines says.
Chinese is an incredibly difficult language to learn, notes Jeffrey Chan, assistant director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at The Ohio State University. One needs to know about 3,000 characters to be literate. College-level students would be expected to know about half of the nearly 20,000 Chinese characters.
“Every single word has a different pictograph for the word, and that can be very time-consuming,” he says. “Chances are, people do forget along the way — particularly the strokes, which are very important for the character. If you miss a stroke, it might end up meaning something entirely different.”
A study the Inkren trio did a year ago at Oberlin confirms that retention issue. On average, second-year students of Chinese could remember how to write 39 percent of the characters they had been taught. Third-year students fared slightly worse, recalling only 38 percent of what they had once known.
Chan said he has read about Skritter and believes it will be very useful to students.
“One of the things that Chinese teachers come across is the difficult part of teaching students the writing of the characters,” he says.
Saines and Winter teamed with fellow Oberlin alum Scott Erickson to help handle technical issues. Although he originally was a music major at Oberlin, Erickson now has a computer science degree, and he spends a lot of time working on the program’s scheduling system.
“It keeps track of what characters you know and how well you know them and then schedules them [for practice] accordingly,” he says.
So far, the group has received a $30,000 fellowship from Oberlin’s Creativity and Leadership Project to help get the company off the ground, and a recent $25,000 grant from the Lorain County Community College Innovation Fund will go toward continued development.
Even so, Inkren requires little capital. The friends work out of their rented house near the Oberlin campus. They use their own computers. And the grant from Oberlin pays for living expenses, which takes care of the $900 per month rent, $40 in monthly Internet access and $6 per day for food for each guy.
“This is so different than from what I’ve read about business,” says Winter, who didn’t start studying Chinese until his sophomore year and graduated from Oberlin with a triple major in computer science, East Asia studies and math. “Things have changed a lot in what you need. We have no costs, and programmers are so productive. If you really want to do something with just three guys, you can do something, and it can be big.”
Saines hopes Inkren will achieve financial sustainability by this summer since, once the full version of the software is released, it will bring in money with little to no work on their part.
“It could become extraordinarily profitable,” Saines says, “considering serving 2,000 users has the same cost to us as serving 100,000.”
The men are hammering out the final kinks in Skritter and looking to the future of their business. Saines, who originally came to Oberlin to major in the natural sciences but left with degrees in economics and cinematic studies, is taking Chinese classes along with Winter. Erickson is studying Japanese.
“I’m learning Japanese so we can grow into that market,” he says. “I’m very much looking forward to building the Japanese portion of the software.”
When the three aren’t working together, they’re playing together. Erickson, Saines and Winter often hang out, playGuitar Hero World Tour and Nintendo’sSuper Smash Brothers or watch movies and Internet videos.
“We’re living in the same house as our co-workers, working 50 hours a week and hanging out together afterward,” Winter says. “We’re basically in this tiny bubble all the time, but we get along really great.”
They’ve all known each other for several years, Saines says, and while they don’t anticipate anything going wrong friendship-wise, they’ve built contingencies into the business plan.
“It is a real concern,” he says. “They always say, don’t mix business with pleasure. This is the most egregious example of that. We’ve all talked about that, and keeping friendships is really important. If that means we don’t become aFortune-bajillion company but we’re still friends, that’s cool.”Character Building Scott Erickson, Nick Winter and George Saines are the genius strokes behind Inkren.Insipired by a video game, three oberlin college students have developed a better way to learn how to write chinese.