The FOSS4ward project is focussed on getting students (grades 5-12) involved with Open Source projects. The plan is to get students to write documentation, do testing, build templates or clip art, instructional cards or video or anything else the project leaders may need them to do. In order not to overwhelm the development team, we envision having an assigned project liaison who would act as a single-point-of-contact between the students and the projects. The ultimate goal is to have FOSS4ward be valuable to both the students and the FOSS projects.
At various FOSS and education conferences, we have been talking with classroom teachers in the USA and abroad about their interest in participating and have gotten quite an enthusiastic response. Many of the teachers we talked to have said 'this sounds great but I wouldn't know where to start'. By working with the individual projects in advance, we hope to be able to provide very targeted answers to teachers. Such documents might say something like 'my project is always looking for students to create .... and the step-by-step instructions are located....' We foresee part of NCOSE's contribution as providing instructions and frameworks to classroom teachers to help them help their students help FOSS projects.
If you are interested in participating, either as a classroom or as a FOSS project, please contact us at foss4ward@ncose.org.