Vocaba creator Scott Foubister sketches some diagrams on the window of his office at the Kamloops Innovation Centre. Foubister is a 2010 TRU Physics grad.
By Bart Cummins
Life is full of opportunities, and at times, it’s difficult to know when to dive in and when to hold back.
A little more than a year ago, Scott Foubister (BSc Physics 2010) was faced with a choice between two paths, though one held a lot more prestige and promise than the other.
On the one side, a lucrative master’s scholarship at the Institute of Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. On the other, a return to his hometown of Kamloops to further develop language-learning software he had created in his last year at TRU. One opportunity was loaded with certainty and a long career in science. The other held a lot of unknowns, and no financial resources to work with.
Easy decision, right? Yep.
“I quickly realized I was more passionate about the language program I was leaving behind than I was about the research career I was starting,” Foubister recalls. “I liked the promise (of the software) and knew if I didn’t go for it, I would always ask, ‘What if?’.”
What if Foubister hadn’t left Waterloo two weeks into the fall 2010 semester to return home? And what if he hadn’t signed up for a one-month intensive Spanish field school in Mexico in May 2010, where the story begins? Wanting more than a tourist’s understanding of Spanish, he created a list of words and phrases in an Excel spreadsheet. He wrote macros to turn the spreadsheet in a program that could quiz him and track his progress. When he shared the program with Annette Dominik, modern languages coordinator at TRU, Foubister saw great possibilities to help others as well as himself.
If he hadn’t signed up for that field school and if he hadn’t left Waterloo, Foubister’s language software, which is now called Vocaba, may never have been born.
A student tests his Spanish using Vocaba in one of the language labs in the Arts and Education building at TRU.
It’s taken Foubister many revisions and more than 15,000 lines of code to get to his current success: giving TRU students access to a sleek, customizable and easy-to-use web application that looks nothing like the original Excel spreadsheet that started it all. Last fall approximately 150 Spanish students at TRU beta-tested a downloadable version of the program. That number has tripled this fall and it includes students in Spanish, French, Japanese, English as a Second Language, botany and linguistics. In most of these classes students receive a portion of their course mark based on their usage of Vocaba. Students pay $10 per semester to get access to the website.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM3pWvOGbt0[/youtube]
Foubister would like to see 1,000 TRU students using Vocaba by January 2012 as he continues to expand coverage to more courses and programs. Vocaba is suitable for any course involving vocabulary or terminology – from languages to sciences to business and more. Sometime soon, he’d like to see Vocaba used at other universities, high schools and even in workplaces.
Foubister’s passion has taken him far, but he’s the first to tell you he’s done a lot of listening along the way and heeded a lot of advice. Among those he owes a world of gratitude: Lincoln Smith, Industry University Liaison in the Research, Innovation, and Graduate Studies Office (RIGS) at TRU; the entrepreneur incubator Kamloops Innovation Centre; and the Interior Innovation Science Council.
Scott Foubister tells members of the TRU Cheer Squad about his language software called Vocaba during the Welcome Back BBQ this past September.
It was Smith who helped identify the distribution problem that would prevent Foubister from scaling up his business. Requiring users to download his application meant people didn’t always have the latest and greatest, leading Foubister to spend more time on maintenance than on growing his business. Being web-based now means he can continue to improve his software and distribute it to customers with ease. He can respond much more quickly to suggestions, often able to implement them in a matter of minutes or hours.
Smith has also shown Foubister how to be critical of Vocaba and to adopt an entrepreneur’s mindset.
“Scott is an example of what you can do when you follow your passion, and remain open to opportunities it can provide,” Smith says. “Everyone has an idea for an innovative product or service. Every time you solve a problem, or say to yourself ‘I wish this existed’ there is the potential for an entrepreneurial enterprise. If you remain open to this potential, and seek the support to evaluate it, great things can happen.”
He goes on to say, “It takes only ten minutes to sit down with a mentor to investigate a business idea, to save a life time of wondering ‘What if?’.”
