Recently the GNOME Foundation announced the “Coding Education Challenge”, A three-stage event to offer students and teachers the opportunity to share ideas and innovative projects to teach programming using open source software.
For the financing (and the prize to the winners), Endless has donated 500 thousand dollars to give a boost to the competition and make it more attractive to students and teachers around the world. Half a million dollars is a really attractive figure for the teams (or people) that are in the first places.
Endless is a company very present in the technology community worldwide. Its main goal is to help children have digital access and take advantage of it. Among other projects they have the distribution Endless OS and Linux mini computers they trade to aid their educational projects.
In a press release, Neil McGovern, CEO of the GNOME Foundation mentioned being happy that Endless has joined:
"We are excited to see what we can achieve when we support the imagination and creativity of our global community. We look forward to a strong partnership for our students and teachers to explore the possibilities of a vast and diverse software ecosystem. Reaching the new generations is vital to ensure the future of free software in the coming years."
Up to $ 100,000 for winners
Additionally, to the announcement and donation, of which there is not much information, it is known that anyone - team or individual - can submit their proposal to be part of the competition.
It has been decided that in the first stage There will be 20 winners who will receive $ 6,500 for each of their ideas.
For the second stage, the winners will have to create a working prototype of their idea and only five chosen will advance to the third round, each receiving a prize of $ 25,000.
In the final stage the prototyped product will be created in its full version and there will only be two final winners. The 3 finalists will receive $ 25,000, while the 2 winners will get $ 100,000 each. If you want to know all the details of this competition you can enter this link.