SMALL TECH: ARCDNA DEVELOPS A BIG-TIME APP
If anyone knows how difficult it is to juggle a full schedule of college classes, student clubs and a part-time job, it's Angel Henderson.
The Old Dominion University graduate student splits his time between earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering, participating in student groups and working his internship at NASA Langley Research Center.
Earlier this year, the 23-year-old added one more thing to his schedule: running a small company that developed a time-management application to help college students keep track of classes, assignments, jobs and extracurriculars. Henderson is one of four ODU students who founded ArcDNA, which this past summer launched a free app for the iPhone called College TA. It has since been downloaded more than 1,500 times by students across the world.
The four students - friends since meeting at ODU in 2008 - got the idea for the application in December after watching "Waiting for Superman," a documentary about inner-city children vying for a chance to go to a charter school. The four students brainstormed ways to try to make a difference, he said. By January, they had started writing code for the time management app.
"When we saw the film, we didn't think that this app would solve that problem, but we wanted to find a way that every student in the United States and the world would have the best possible education," Henderson said. "That is our goal, using technology."
Henderson and Gregory Rogers, a mechanical engineering student, continued to work on the app for months. Raqwon Perryman, a criminology and sociology major, manages the finances. And Darius Moore, an information technology major, developed the website.
ArcDNA plans to launch College TA on other mobile phone platforms by the end of the year, Henderson said. The company also wants to create a similar application for high school students.
"We want to do this for the rest of our lives if we could," Henderson said. "I know you see an application, but that was just our first step. Our hope is to work on software that kindergarten students or fifth-graders are using in their classrooms."