STEM student Sydelle Young participates Thursday in the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund kick off at the Chattanooga Library.Six more Chattanooga Internet ventures will share in another $165,400 of grants from Mozilla's Gigabit Community Fund.
Mozilla, backed by the National Science Foundation, announced today that 10 projects in Kansas City and Chattanooga will receive grants from $5,000 to $30,000 each to build and pilot gigabit-enabled applications and associated curricula in the two cities that offer the high-speed Internet service.
The Chattanooga businesses picked today include:
* Building an App from the Ground Up ' The Creative Discovery Museum: Constructing an application toolbox and digital record that will serve as a design blueprint for other youth-serving organizations in Chattanooga and beyond.
* devLearn ' Duncan Ingram, Inc: Developing a mobile coding application for elementary school students that will build critical capacity for Chattanooga's gigabit future.
* GigBridge ' Global Excel Tennessee: Bolstering English language skills and improving access to health education in minority communities by teaching students for whom English is a second language to construct interactive mobile applications focused on obesity education and prevention.
* The GigLab ' Chattanooga Public Library: Providing public access to gigabit connected resources for the purposes of workforce development, application testing and education.
* Viditor ' GeonCode: Expanding and piloting a new, online collaborative video editor.
* Wireless Earth Watchdogs ' Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences: Creating a student-driven, real-time water quality monitoring system using micro-controllers in collaboration with Hixson High School and the Chattanooga Public Library.
Each of the selected projects will soon begin a 12-week pilot program that will run from late July to October.
"The Gigabit Fund is transforming how communities learn and the accessibility of learning methods by piloting next generation innovation as "living labs" in classrooms, cultural institutions and other informal educational environments, putting technology in the service of education," said Kari Keefe, community catalyst for the Gigabit Fund KC.
Working in partnership with the National Science Foundation and US Ignite, the $300,000 Gigabit Community Fund was created earlier this year to advance the development, experimentation and implementation of learning and workforce opportunities enhanced by new, super powerful Internet technologies like Google Fiber and EPB. Eight other projects were previously selected for funding in Kansas City and Chattanooga - the only two cities in the Western hemisphere to offer citywide gigabit-per-second Internet service.