Bright ideas in SW Florida

COURTESY PHOTO Riley Anne Zuccerello, a third grader at Vineyards Elementary, uses a Study Buddy handheld tutor. She missed two questions on the FCAT this year. Southwest Floridians are known for pioneering things like vast retirement communities, citrus operations and tourist hot spots. But creative minds diversify the local economy in myriad ways, by escaping conventions and demanding that their heartfelt convictions be turned into reality.

Here are a few inventors who took their ideas all the way, and in doing so, changed the way we live, work and play.

Where kids can study for tests like FCAT: anywhere, anytime

In the early 1990s, school principals were not impressed when Jeff Cameron attempted to sell them on his handheld learning device and online assessment program that could help raise students' test scores and boost schools' academic ratings.

But when kids tried Mr. Cameron's Study Buddy, a portable tutor aimed at helping them learn materials they are tested for on the FCAT or during general classes, they couldn't put it down.

FLORIDA WEEKLY FILE PHOTO Dr. Sharon Isern in her lab at Florida Gulf Coast University. "Kids use it in cars, they use it in after-school settings," Mr. Cameron says. "It makes learning portable."

Principals started taking note, even though it would be a few years before handheld video games came on the market and made the undeniable case for how addictive such interactive systems can be.

These days, principals get hooked on Study Buddies and recommend them to other schools around the country. "That has caused more than half our growth," Mr. Cameron says, adding the system is used by more than 5,000 grade schools in 45 states — including six schools in Collier County and six in Lee County.

Mr. Cameron started his company, Brainchild, in 1992 in Naples. It produces the Study Buddy, which costs $299, and the online assessment program called Achievement, which costs $3.50 per student per year and allows parents and teachers to monitor a child's progress.

A graduate of Boston University, Mr. Cameron produced educational television for 20 years, then started an educational publishing company for firefighters, EMTs and paramedics after he moved to Naples in 1983. "What we did for them I decided I wanted to do for school children," he says. "I was an ADD kid all my life, so I knew what it was like not to be able to focus my attention on anything."

EVAN WILLIAMS/FLORIDA WEEKLY Ed DeMartin in his Naples home. By hiring software code writers, animators and academic content writers, he has been able to incorporate content for Study Buddies based on the state school standards all around the country. The device helps students learn points in economics, political science, math, writing and other subjects so they perform well on tests.

Study Buddy allows children to study anytime, anywhere and on their own terms. When a student gets a question wrong, Study Buddy tells them the correct answer and gives feedback on why the initial answer was incorrect and how to get it right the next time. The handheld device and the corresponding online assessment program are available in English, Spanish or Haitian.

Mr. Cameron says he was inspired to create the Study Buddy system for people like himself and his son. He also wanted to help people like his wife, who studied to become a certified financial planner, flipping back and forth through lengthy textbooks to find answers to practice questions.

"I thought, man, is this inefficient," Mr. Cameron says. "Wouldn't it be nice if you had something in the palm of your hand and you could hit a button and it would tell you if you were wrong or right and why?"

At Brainchild, Mr. Cameron is designing a new prototype of the Study Buddy with a larger screen that will be Internetcapable. He also has a program called the FCAT 10, which helps high-school student prepare for their exit exam.

"I just figured different people learn things differently," he says. "Wouldn't it be great for someone to get some instruction gently, and without the embarrassment of doing it in front of the other kids in the classroom?"

Sexy mud flaps for trucks

Ed DeMartin had just graduated from the prestigious Pratt Institute, School of Art and Design in New York. In his early 20s, he accepted a freelance assignment from DuPont To promote its rubber products.

"They were selling to truck companies and wanted me to do something truckers would appreciate so they would generate goodwill for Dupont," Mr. DeMartin, now at home in Naples, says.

Reasoning that all truckers love women, Mr. DeMartin designed something that would fit on a mud flap. "It was a girl in silhouette, kind of with her hair blowing, in profile, showing her breasts, showing her rear end," he says.

He was paid $50 for what has become a ubiquitous, iconic image.

"It's one of those lasting images that struck a responsive chord in people," he says, adding she's probably the most lasting image he's ever created — and the one for which he received the smallest fee. "Interesting," he says. Besides mud flaps, the sexy babe has been on belt buckles, T-shirts and on "The Sopranos," in the fictional Bada Bing! club.

Mr. DeMartin went on to open one of the world's leading private design firms. He created images that resonate in the culture, like the design for Tic Tac, an update of the Morton Salt girl and the logo for Fruit of the Loom.

He was also one of the first to project type onto a human figure, as in the girl on the Yuban coffee tin. "That was the first can, by the way, that featured a photograph on the package," he says. "We were trying to change the look from an exotic foreign blend to an all-American coffee… We turned corporate images around so people could respond to the company more favorably."

Mr. DeMartin speculates about why the broad on the mud flaps became so popular. "There's a trick to memory, and it's associating with imagery," he says. "Something that you can create an image of in your mind is something that's very difficult to forget… As a designer, you look for symbols that relate to your client. In this case (of the sexy broad on mud flaps), it didn't relate to anything except men."

He doesn't think about that old broad very often anymore, even though she's still out there rumbling along America's roadways. "I just see her for what she was," he says, "a design assignment. I don't take anything more out it than that." Journey to the center of a cell

Sharon Isern is doing big-time research at Florida Gulf Coast University — as in revolutionary, groundbreaking — but she likes to get down to a molecular level most days. Dr. Isern found a new way to introduce materials into cells that could potentially cure diseases and even change DNA makeup.

That could mean delivering cancer drugs to cells in a non-invasive way, unlike chemotherapy.

It could mean delivering DNA into a cell and actually changing its genetic structure, so genetic diseases like color blindness, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy or Parkinson's could be overridden.

The invention works by using a soundgenerating machine in a non-traditional way. The machine is traditionally used to break open organic material. But Dr. Isern discovered that if she "tweaked it down a few notches," it was possible to make gentle enough sound waves to create a hole in a cell that would eventually close up again.

While the hole is open, the cell is immersed in fluid — its natural habitat — and medicine or DNA can be floated through the hole. It's patent pending now.

"It was serendipity, really," she says. "There happened to be this piece of equipment and it was really a 'eureka' moment. It didn't work the first time. It takes a little finesse to find the right tweak."

How exactly the machine is tweaked is a secret.

An associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at FGCU, Dr. Isern is a member of the university's Biotechnology Research Group. She's also working on a number of patents that could inhibit the mosquito borne Dengue virus, of which the World Health Organization estimates there are 50 million cases worldwide every year.

Besides curing diseases, Dr. Isern's research could mean big business locally. FGCU wants to commercialize the technology by partnering with other business entities and research groups that might relocate to Southwest Florida.

One place that aims to attract those businesses is Madden Research Loop, a development near Southwest Florida International Airport that was strategically planned in close proximity to FGCU to lure medical researchers, pharmaceutical companies and other biotech industries.

"It fits perfectly with our mission and the types of businesses we want to attract," says Lee County Commissioner Tammy Hall. "The goal is not to have 75 percent of our economy in the construction industry."