Three Avalon Park Groups Join Hands with Schools to Create Community Garden

ORLANDO - Residents of Avalon Park in east Orlando have created a unique partnership to develop a community garden.

Stephanie Hodson, marketing coordinator for Avalon Park Group, which is developing the neotraditional community, said the Avalon Park Property Owners Association is behind the project that includes the Avalon Park Garden Club, Avalon Church and Avalon Park’s schools.

“Property Manager, Tracy Durham, has been organizing all of the details including working with Avalon Church to set aside a parcel of land to be used for the garden,” Hodson reported. “The project will afford students a hands-on opportunity to learn gardening and nutritional skills and a provide place for town home and apartment residents to plant their own vegetables,” Hodson explained.

Hodson said the garden, which will kick off its first planting season this spring, will reserve a special space for a butterfly garden of native flowers.

If all goes well---gardening is subject to the trials of nature, after all---Hodson said the entire Avalon Park community can benefit.

“We hope to produce great vegetables we can sell in our Farmers Market, with proceeds going to the Avalon Park Foundation.”

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For more information about this release, please contact: Stephanie Hodson, Marketing Coordinator, Avalon Park Group, 407-658-6565

Plainvue Software, Inc. Offers Custom Learning Games for Publishers, Virtual Schools and Digital Texts

ORLANDO, Fla., --- Plainvue Software, Inc., an independent video game studio based in Orlando, is expanding to offer publishers, virtual schools and digital text producers custom design of learning games for late elementary and middle school students.

Plainvue produces the Order of the Abacus™ series of video games available for download at the Apple iTunes Store for iPhone and iPod Touch. The game series is designed to sharpen the math skills of late elementary and middle school students. Recent releases include Fraction's Kitchen™ which reinforces pre-algebra topics, quantities and manipulation of fractions, Chainshooter™ which teaches math orders of operations, and Fortune's Prime™ which teaches prime numbers.

Daniel Roy, chief executive officer of Plainvue Software, Inc., said educators and artists can create custom games, animations and other digital learning media for virtual classrooms and digital textbooks.

The Order of the Abacus™ game series was developed for iPhone and iPod Touch platforms, Roy said. Plainvue has also developed games and prototypes for Adobe Flash player and can rapidly transpose its games to all platforms supported by the Torque game engine.
Plainvue's Order of the Abacus™ series of games explore pre-algebra math concepts through play, in order to gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of the underlying abstract concepts in mathematical thinking, Roy said.

“Digital kids---children raised after the advent of the Internet---identify with virtual representations which interact to achieve specific learning goals. Plainvue's games offer the interactivity and engagement digital kids crave while meeting standards-based learning objectives,” Roy said.

For more information about Plainvue’s Order of the Abacus™ games for late elementary and middle school students, visit www.orderoftheabacus.com.

Plainvue is a client of the University of Central Florida Business Incubation Program in the Central Florida Research Park in east Orlando.

For more information, contact:
Daniel Roy, CEO, Plainvue Software, Inc., 407-277-2973, droy@plainvuesoftware.com

Carol Ann Dykes, Site Manager, UCF Business Incubation Program, 407-882-0211, cdykes@mail.ucf.edu

Larry Vershel or Beth Payan, Larry Vershel Communications, 407-644-4142 or LvershelCo@aol.com

About the UCF Incubation Program:
Since its founding in 1999, the UCF Business Incubation Program has helped more than 130 emerging companies (including nearly 80 current clients) create over $500 million in annual revenue and more than 1600 new jobs with an average salary of $59,000. With six facilities across the Greater Orlando community, the Incubation Program is a collaboration in economic development between the University of Central Florida, Orange County, the City of Orlando, Seminole County, the City of Winter Springs, The City of Sanford, Lake County, the City of Leesburg, and the Florida High Tech Corridor Council. For more information, please visit www.incubator.ucf.edu.