GNOME Launches Coding Education Challenge With $500k In Funding

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Launches Coding Education Challenge With $500k In Funding

The GNOME Foundation has kicked off their Coding Education Challenge for promoting programming around free/open-source software and with Endless Computers providing the $500,000 USD for prize money...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Code-Ed-Challenge

[kpedersen]

The best education a kid could have is to avoid gnome dependencies in their own projects because they deprecate or change too quickly.

Gnome (perhaps even the whole of FreeDesktop.org) is basically a monolithic project at this point, only the build system perhaps masquerades as a modular one to those who have never tried porting something to a non-Linux system XD

Joking and complaining aside; it is good to see a programming education campaign that is involving free software. Even if it does just end up becoming a Python-fest.

[paulcarroty]

I'd guess this challenge funded by IBM 'cause they want to invest and promote GNOME desktop, which demonstrate no major progress/innovation last 3-4 years.

[uid313]

I don't think coding education is needed, those who want to learn can easily learn by themselves. I don't think coding should be pushed upon everyone, else you have to work with people who work as programmers even though they should have been plumbers, mechanics or or carpenters. These people produce shitty code, and have no understanding of a computer.

I've had co-workers come to me saying code gets erased when they typed, I went over to their computer and pressed the "Insert" button on the keyboard. These people are developers.

[microcode]

I don't know how effective or useful this is to the GNOME Foundation, but at least this time it's not another weird woke sexist project.

Maybe they'll make something cool though. Hackathon-style stuff like this can sometimes make for interesting outcomes. :- )

[L_A_G]

Let's hope this outreach isn't geographically limited to the U.S like their most well known outreach effort. When you limit a supposed outreach effort to a single country it's not really much of an outreach effort no matter how hard you try to set it up. Also doesn't exactly help alleviate the common image of Americans thinking of themselves as the center of the universe and the rest of the world as something that should stay out if it's way and bombed into a parking lot if it doesn't.

After all Google's GSoC is also an excellent outreach effort and emulating it, even if tangentially, is always a good idea.

[Spooktra]

Someone needs to check their math, 20 winners of $6500 = $130000; 5 winners of $25000 = $125000; the final winner gets $100000 and the runner up gets $25000.

$130,000+$125,000+$100,000+$25,000 = $380,000, where's the extra $120,000?

[kpedersen]

I don't think coding education is needed, those who want to learn can easily learn by themselves.

I certainly agree when it comes to being a developer as a career. However I think kids having general knowledge of how code works (and thus how a computer works) is useful. Otherwise they really will just treat it like a magic box and get into the cycle of consuming. For example grabbing a Raspberry Pi (or an old Thinkpad) and a few very simple scripts to play some videos from the internet rather than purchasing some iCrap to rent the privilege is the best outcome.

[starshipeleven]

I've had co-workers come to me saying code gets erased when they typed, I went over to their computer and pressed the "Insert" button on the keyboard. These people are developers.

Letting their code be erased is probably a good thing.

[starshipeleven]

Someone needs to check their math, 20 winners of $6500 = $130000; 5 winners of $25000 = $125000; the final winner gets $100000 and the runner up gets $25000.

$130,000+$125,000+$100,000+$25,000 = $380,000, where's the extra $120,000?

administrative costs (i.e. someone steals 90% of it, the rest is actually used to pay expenses)