Jake Rolan sat at Starbucks on Thayer Street one day last month, busy on both his laptop and iPhone, seemingly no different from the other students who had carved out an itinerant workspace there, cursing out the wireless network that seemed to fade in and out.
But the curly-haired 16-year-old from Miami, a high-school junior taking economic classes at Brown for the summer, was different: Rolan won the Miami Herald Business Challenge for his iPhone application, which allows the user to create his or her own flash cards for studying and sharing with others. His collaborator is Marika Wei, who does the development and design of the application.
Rolan now has a contract with McGraw Hill publishing, which will put all of its textbooks online in September, as part of his flashcard application, sorted by chapter and term.
High school and college students, take note: from chemistry to physics, from American history to Spanish, from Psychology 101 to art history, you can now plug in your own flashcards on your iPhone.
Rolan, in his no-nonsense rat-a-tat-tat style of conversation, said the success of his application is strengthened by recent studies that point to the success of flashcards as an enhanced learning technique.
The flashcard iPhone application, which can be viewed at miphol.com/flashme, is now available in several languages — including Spanish, French, Russian, and Hebrew.
The precocious Nolan, who attends Gulliver Preparatory School in Florida, described himself as "an entrepreneur and an avid investor." In between long sips of his coffee drink, he talked about how he is busy working on a security system for a major fast food chain, involving software that will enable closed circuit television systems to integrate images from 10,000 cameras. He has arranged for a production facility in China to do the manufacturing necessary.
Rolan said he decided to study at Brown this summer in part because he has family in Rhode Island, an 86-year-old grandmother. Despite the rainy summer weather, Rolan said, he's become a fan of the state.
Poised to finish his summer economics program at Brown ("It's a lot of work; there's about four hours of homework each day"), Rolan said he would be vacationing at Hilton Head in South Carolina with his family and his girlfriend, Gina.
But with the weekend beckoning, Rolan and some friends were heading to Newport. What's the best beach?, he asked, busy recording the reply on his iPhone.
"Second Beach, in Middletown."
