Teaching Computational Thinking and Coding? Get Funds for Your Classroom Activities

Note: the Call for Proposals initiative is closed. Should further dates be announced, details will be provided.

If you teach Grades 5-12 students in Canada, Callysto wants to help fund your classroom activities related to computational thinking and coding. For example, you could submit a proposal to cover the cost of developing curriculum resources that feature Jupyter Notebooks (for students, or current/pre-service teachers), or for hosting a coding workshop or student hackathon (e.g. to cover the cost of the venue, catering, or support staff).

Haven’t heard of Callysto? It’s a free, interactive, curriculum-based learning and skills development tool; think “interactive textbook.” Computational thinking is becoming a requirement for the workers of tomorrow — our goal is to give students a head start.

Deadline

The deadline to submit a proposal is February 15, 2020, for activities that will occur between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021.

Applicants are welcome to email proposal drafts to the Callysto team for feedback, well in advance of the deadline, to proposals@callysto.ca.

Submit your proposal in three steps:

  1. Review the assessment criteria; this will ensure your activity is eligible.
  2. Read the “Eligible Activities” (below “deadlines”) to help you brainstorm.
  3. Submit your proposal using the Callysto APPLICATION FORM.

That’s it!

Eligible Activities

STUDENT TRAINING WORKSHOPS (1 day, 2 day, full week)
Workshops targeting small-to-medium sized groups of students, from individual schools or between schools, are ideal. Such workshops can be tailored to meet the needs of specific grades, ability levels, interests, or special audiences. Workshop formats can include hands-on interactions, presentation style, project-based, and more.

TEACHER TRAINING WORKSHOPS (1 day, 2 day, full week)
Workshops targeting teachers can include materials on computational thinking and coding that they can use in their classrooms. These may be specialized activities for particular curricular outcomes (e.g. data science in the humanities), or more broadly based. Funding for activities can include bookings for presentation space, catering, covering substitute teacher costs, and so on.

CONFERENCE DEMOS and PRESENTATIONS
Active demonstrations and presentations at teachers’ conventions, Professional Development Days, and other educational conferences targeting the K-12 community can be an effective way to reach educators about new technology training tools.

CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
Funding is available for projects that develop specific curriculum materials using the Callysto technology, for delivery in the classroom. Sample “notebooks” on the Callysto.ca website show how such tools can be used for diverse topics in science, mathematics, humanities, and more. Our goal is to create additional content that can be delivered to a wide range of classrooms.

CALLYSTO SOFTWARE TOOLS DEVELOPMENT
Funding is available to create software tools that extend the capabilities of the Callyso environment. We will support ideas that lead to the creation of open source software tools that facilitate the delivery of K-12 curriculum using the Callysto platform.

ACTIVITIES WITH SMALL BUDGETS
Activities with budgets under $1,000CAD (such as short workshops and demonstrations) can be proposed at any time via an email to the Callysto team (proposals@callysto.ca), and may be approved directly at the discretion of the Callysto leadership.

OTHER ACTIVITIES
Funding is not limited to the above categories. Innovative projects that touch on the delivery of training in computational thinking and coding for our target audience of teachers and students in K-12 will also be considered.

We look forward to seeing your proposals! Thanks for participating.