Re: [school-discuss] SchoolForge Art Gallery?

["Charles Cosse" <ccosse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

i must have missed Justin's  funding opportunities post, so thanks for the reminder.

IMHO the following would work:
The SchoolForge community establishes a truly open, interest-neutral, software base for educational applications, hosted at SchoolForge, perhaps,  which serves as a foundation for satellite programs around the world.  

Let's say this software base exists. Now,  an arbitrary  university professor (or other) submits a funding proposal to the institution of their choice (NSF in US, local Dept of Education, etc) and proposes that funding be provided for mentoring a handful of students, (perhaps as a college class, perhaps as a high-school class, even an after school program, etc) to develop education applications derived from the software base that they download from SchoolForge.   

The software base would have everything a non-programmer would need to derive their innovations in the form of a new educational application, conforming to a few specifications, such as student assessment data-taking capabilities output format, namely, so data from various apps could be mixed/matched and compared.

The apps could be designed in cooperation with local school systems to compliment their curriculum, or fill-in blanks which textbooks don't cover. The student developers would learn valuable programming skills, corporate sponsors might like to provide some support (thereby establishing early relationships with promising, motivated students), and the finished apps would be uploaded back into a central schoolforge repository for the benefit of schools everywhere.  

As opensource/GPL'd  applications, successive refinements could be made and the apps perfected over subsequent generations and refinements.  

It should be a win-win-win proposition for everyone involved.  Surely such a program could be a strong candidate for funding through multiple channels, corporate and government alike.  

Again, the basic premise is that no single person claims ownership,  we all claim ownership.  The base package evolves according to opensource principles and satellite programs around the world spring-up and seek funding through their own local sources to address their own local needs.  

Greetings to all,
Charles Cosse

Joel Kahn wrote:
> Not too long ago, Justin wrote:
>
>
>> If anyone knows of any funding opportunities
>> for development - I'm all ears!
>>