Mozilla’s Gigabit Community Fund will help support four projects in Kansas City that use ultra-fast Internet to enhance education.
“The Gigabit Fund is transforming how communities learn and the accessibility of learning methods by piloting nextgeneration 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.
Mozilla is the organization behind the Firefox Internet browser and other open-source software. The grants are a partnership with the National Science Foundation and US Ignite.
Those projects include the following:
- Students at Northland CAPS and local businesses will team up to create tools that help lower the hospital-readmission rates of high-risk patients.
- The Kansas City Public Library will mash up video game Minecraft and Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset, to create a program where young people can build a virtual reality version of their perfect neighborhood.
- Health app Fitnet and the University of Kansas Medical Center have developed a program, Healthy Hawks, that will encourage children to stay active. The grant will help pay for iPads and data plans so families can follow a workout plan.
- PlanIT Impact KC is an app that helps architecture students learn early building design. The app draws on the City of Kansas City’s geographic information system (GIS) data, creating a 3-D look at how a potential project would interact with existing neighborhoods.
Kansas City isn’t the only city to receive the grants. Six projects in Chattanooga, which has its own gigabit-speed Internet service, have been awarded funding. All told, the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund is spending more than $165,000 on this round of grants; individual awards range from $5,000 to $30,000.
(Pictured Above: A screenshot from PlanIT Impact KC)
