RIT game wins award and young boy’s heart
Like many 9-year-old boys, Luke Fortner enjoys playing video games on a handheld electronic gadget.
But Luke isn’t like most 9-year-old boys. And other kids don’t have a game like his.
Luke is visually impaired and plays on a one-of-a-kind device created just for him by a team of Rochester Institute of Technology students. The creation won the 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Student Design Awards contest, which carries a $5,000 prize.
“The thing for me, as a mom, that was so significant, was to watch this team of college students really take the time to get to know Luke and see Luke as a person,” said Luke’s mother, Cindy Fortner of Fairport, a second-grade teacher at Brooks Hill Elementary School in the Fairport Central School District.
Luke’s father, Mike Fortner, is a fifth-grade teacher at Brooks Hill.
Creating the game for Luke became a senior-year project at RIT. All RIT engineering students must complete such a project before they graduate. But this venture wasn’t like most others.
“It was a very difficult project and it was kind of non-typical compared to what they usually do for senior design projects,” said Jesse Muszynski, 23, of Rochester, now an RIT graduate student and a member of the team.
Most senior projects involve two to four students, but this one used 10. That’s because expertise was needed in a range of disciplines, including industrial design, electrical engineering, computer programming and game design.
Most student teams never get to know the people who will use what they make, but things were different this time.
“We saw firsthand, we knew there was a 9-year-old boy who was going to use this game and that definitely made it more exciting,” Muszynski said.
Another big difference: “It worked and it actually lasted,” said George Slack, a lecturer at RIT who oversees the senior engineering projects.
Often, the products created by the student teams either don’t work or work for only a short time, Slack said.
Luke and his twin brother, Jack, were born three months premature.
“His vision loss is a result of prematurity,” Cindy Fortner said, referring to a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. “We actually are very grateful for the vision that he has because we were told when he was an infant that he wouldn’t see anything.
“It’s difficult to say with numbers how much he can see. He’s significantly visually impaired, but he’s not totally blind,” she said.
In a lot of ways, his mother said, Luke is “a regular kid.”
“He’s got a great sense of humor. He’s very funny, and he can fight with his brother like any brothers do,” she said.
Luke is in a regular third-grade classroom, although he gets some extra help because of his visual impairment.
The idea of a game for Luke started about 3½ years ago with his pediatrician, Dr. Julie Lenhard of Perinton.
Lenhard noticed that when Luke and his brother came to her office for checkups, Jack could look at books and magazines or draw pictures while sitting in the waiting room. But because of his vision problem, Luke had nothing similar to do.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be great if Luke had a (Nintendo) Game Boy sort of toy that was suited for him, that he could play with quietly in the many various situations when the adults were boring and talking and he had nothing to do,” Lenhard said.
Her efforts to interest big companies such as Microsoft and Nintendo were dead ends.
But, through friends and the parents of patients, Lenhard found Slack. Eventually, the idea became a senior project with the help of about $6,000 from the National Science Foundation.
Built from scratch with a combination of custom-made and commercially available parts, the “Interactive Game for Child,” as it’s called in the team’s documentation, has a plastic case, a rechargeable battery, two short handles on the sides, buttons for playing the games, and a screen that’s about four inches square.
The students created three separate games that are programmed onto tiny memory disks like the ones used in digital cameras, which plug into a slot on the top of the device. The games mainly use colored circles, squares and triangles big enough for Luke to see.
One is a memory game in which the players must repeat a series of shapes shown on the screen. In another game, the player finds his way through a maze. The third is an avoidance game in which the player must move out of the way of falling objects.
Between the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009, when the project was completed, Luke and his parents met with the students about 10 times.
“I like it,” said Luke, as he played a game at the dining room table of his home. “But I didn’t like all the meetings.”
The sometimes-lengthy meetings would occur when the students had a version of the device to test. Once Luke tested it, they would ask him questions: Could he see the game clearly on the screen? Did he like the way the buttons worked? Then Luke would wait while they made adjustments.
“They wanted to get all the information they could about what Luke could see so that whatever they designed would work,” Cindy Fortner said. “They really wanted it to be a leisure time activity for him and that it would be portable.”
There are no plans by RIT to make more of the devices, and RIT has not contacted any companies to manufacture it, but the design is available online for all to see.
While RIT and the students have not patented the device, “any attempt to manufacture it would have to be worked out with RIT and the students,” said William E. Bond, director of RIT’s intellectual property management office.
BLOUDON@DemocratandChronicle.com
To learn more
For more information about Luke Fortner’s electronic game device, go to: http://edge.rit.edu/content/P09003/public/Home.
