Immersed Games is an educational gaming start-up out of Gainesville, Fla., with a mission to harness the addictive power of video games for learning. The company is creating Tyto Online,a social, online learning game set in a virtual world where students level up their characters by completing quests.
Educational video games tend to follow a fragmented app model with many small apps as games without more than a couple hours of content. Lindsey Tropf, CEO of Immersed Games, instead founded the company on the premise that all the content should be in one cohesive world, crafting a story and an environment to provide relevant learning experiences so that students are able to stumble upon quests for content that they otherwise may have never known to exist.
The start-up’s long-term goal is to develop the virtual world as a platform for learning opportunities, giving students in third through twelfth grade the ability to complete quests in many subjects such as science, math, entrepreneurship, technology, arts, history and financial literacy.
Tropf is a doctoral candidate in school psychology at the University of Florida with a specialization in program evaluation and a minor in research and evaluation methodology. Her husband, Ryan Tropf, has a degree in management and ten years of experience in sales and training. He manages the company’s internship program and will be taking on the role of internal and external experiences with human resources and customer support.
The two met Paul Burgermeister, creative director, while playing the video game World of Warcraft. When Burgermeister graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside with a bachelor of arts in graphic design and 3D animation, Ryan and Lindsey invited him to move to Gainesville to found the company together. He accepted and also enrolled at The Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida, where he recently completed his master’s of digital arts and sciences.
The three began work on the company and in December 2013 were awarded second place in Dell’s Education Challenge, winning $5,000. They then began recruiting for an internship program and met the rest of their new co-founding team: Caroline Lamarque, a creative writer with a master’s degree in English, and Samuel Sewall, a senior digital arts and sciences major who leads the programming. Immersed is now preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign in mid-July 2014 to fund the development of the first module of the game, which will focus on middle school ecology.