Meet Mike DiGenova! This U3 Pharmacology student knows “absolutely nothing” about programming, but is running his own software company! He’s got big plans to improve the future of studying for McGill and other university students alike. He’s working on a project called Basilisk, a “peer-to-peer online study tool aimed at enhancing students’ abilities in internalizing facts outside of class.” Currently it’s in its design process, Mike has a team of 12 working on Basilisk. Read on to learn more about the program that he’s entered into the McGill Dobson Cup start-up competition, and about the start-up life.
Emily Campbell for Her Campus McGill (HC McGill): So Mike, what exactly inspired you to do this?
Mike DiGenova (MD): I’m not the best student. I’m always looking for ways to improve my studying. In pharmacology, there is so much memorization involved. And there are so few ways to study: re-writing notes, re-reading notes. Neither of those ways help you in future studying. And the current programs out there are a little lack luster. They lacked question diversity and a good pricing scheme. Also, studying is already mundane and boring, I don’t want to go on a site that is mundane and boring.
HC McGill: Tell me a little bit about Basilisk.
MD: Currently, a lot of classroom tools are for in-class use only. McGill pilots and subscribes to a few other companies that they use for in-class learning, like the clickers for example. I find the issue with this is that they employ top-down learning. This means that the teacher gives all the information, while the students receive and internalize the information, deciding what’s most important based on their understanding and previous knowledge. Because different students have different perspectives and find some things more important than others, establishing a question databank between students is really interesting. It’s also enjoyable to use between the varied question types to earning points and achievements towards redeemable items. It puts a fresh new spin on the old way of studying no one really likes.
HC McGill: How does it compare to what’s already out there?
MD:A lot of other sites are not intuitive. They’re simple but not necessarily minimalist. Basilisk has a minimalist user interface with just a few buttons and is just easy to use. Great user interfaces feel like you’ve already used them. Here’s an example: There’s a game called World of War Craft, which has 13 million users. Compare it to another role-playing game, Eve Online, which has 500,000 users. Eve did a comprehensive study to figure out why they had significantly fewer users than World of War Craft. They looked at the learning curve of their game, and determined that the success of the game is based on how intuitive and approachable their game was.
HC McGill: What’s the biggest hurdle you’ve faced so far?
MD: Well, the biggest problem is university integration. We have to build the framework of the program around the software most educational institutions operate with. That way it makes it easy for the university or school to integrate our program, into MyCourses for example. Once the common software is integrated into Basilisk, it is like fitting two pieces of a puzzle together. The integration is necessary because McGill wants students and professors to be able to use their McGill IDs to login, and to facilitate the transfer of information (like grades) between their programs and Basilisk.
HC McGill: What’s been your favourite part?
MD: Probably the design. I’ve been going to an extra-curricular art class for about 9 years now. There’s a really tedious part of the designing process called usecase development/ description. You literally have to draw out everything for the developers, and it’s taken for granted.
Fingers crossed Basilisk will be up and running and in use next semester at McGill!
Images provided by interviewee.