Endless Grants $500,000 Fund To GNOME Foundation’s Coding Education Challenge

The GNOME foundation recently announced the “Coding Education Challenge“, which is a three-stage competition to offer educators and students the opportunity to share their innovative ideas (projects) to teach coding with free and open-source software.

For the funding (that covers the reward), Endless has issued a $500,000 (half a million) grant to support the competition and attract more educators/students from across the world. Yes, that is a whole lot of money to be awarded to the team (or individual) that wins the competition.

In case you didn’t know about Endless, here’s a background for you – they work on increasing digital access to children and help them to make the most out of it while also educating them about it. Among other projects, they have Endless OS Linux distribution. They also have inexpensive mini PCs running Linux to help their educational projects.

In the press release, Neil McGovern, Executive Director, GNOME Foundation mentioned:

“We’re very grateful that Endless has come forward to provide more opportunities for individuals to learn about free and open-source ”

He also added:

“We’re excited to see what can be achieved when we empower the creativity and imagination of our global community. We hope to make powerful partnerships between students and educators to explore the possibilities of our rich and diverse software ecosystem.  Reaching the next generation of developers is crucial to ensuring that free software continues for many years in the future.”

Matt Dalio, founder of Endless, also shared his thoughts about this competition:

“We fully believe in GNOME’s mission of making technology available and providing the tools of digital agency to all. What’s so unique about the GNOME Project is that it delivers a fully-working personal computer system, which is a powerful real-world vehicle to teach kids to code. There are so many potential ways for this competition to build flourishing ecosystems that empower the next generation to create, learn and build.”

In addition to the announcement of competition and the grant, we do not have more details. However, anyone can submit a proposal for the competition (an individual or a team). Also, it has been decided that there will be 20 winners for the first round and will be rewarded $6500 each for their ideas.

For the second stage of the competition, the winners will be asked to provide a working prototype from which 5 winners will be filtered to get $25,000 each as the prize money.

In the final stage will involve making an end-product where only two winners will be selected. The runners up shall get $25,000 and the winner walks away with $100,000.

Wrapping Up

I’d love to watch out for more details on ‘Coding Education Challenge’ by GNOME Foundation. We shall update this article for more details on the competition.

While the grant makes it look like a great initiative by GNOME Foundation, what do you think about it? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.