

Codestarter is winding down - shurcooL
http://blog.codestarter.org/after-crowdfunding-more-than-500-laptops-codestarter-is-winding-down-opperations/

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draker
It is unfortunate they are shutting down, but if they were only using
donations as a means of funding it seems inevitable.

Maybe a dual mission/stage program would have been better.

Use initial donations to buy laptops, rent space and pay for speakers to have
a coding bootcamp type program for unemployed or disadvantaged people. If you
wanted the primary focus to be on school age kids you could consider
highschool juniors/seniors that were not planning to go to college.

Prepare them for a job as an entry level coder or designer. When they get a
job hopefully they will donate back to the program and/or provide mentorship
for the new sections.

If establish the older section (age 16+) first, you could have additional
funding opportunities by having the students host, "How to use
{software/product}" classes. Ask for donations or a recommended fee for those
that could afford it. Also make it available for free to help other
disadvanted job seekers learn the fundamentals of Windows, Office, Internet
searching, etc.

Once you had some older established alumni or employees you could transition
to the younger demographic by hosting coding classes and summer camps for a
fee. Then use the revenue to sponsor under privileged kids to attend it as
well.

The goal would be to have the kids attending for free eventually transition to
junior counselers or teachers for the camps and classes.

It would take a few years, and could still fail, but would have a better
chance of surviving with a revenue model that didn't focus solely on outside
donations.

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sloanesturz
I think they could have done a lot of good work by giving lots of kids chrome
books and setting them up with dirt simple EC2 vms + awesome remote editing
software. That way you get to keep the chrome book intact with default
settings, run everything through the browser (which means you can skip the
chrome book for kids who have computer access) and give them real computing
power + the benefits of remote development (frequent backups, standardized
auto-updating environments, etc)

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codinghorror
Hmm, you make a really good point. Then the system requirements become super
low, at the cost of requiring stable / reliable / reasonable internet
connectivity.. seems inevitable longer term but not sure about the kids and
schools that were targeted.

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ajhit406
Having a development environment and editor in the browser is definitely the
way to go for students learning to code. Updating a browser is significantly
easier and cheaper than purchasing a new machine. Kids learning to code
shouldn't have to worry about specs, software installation, and OS
configuration.

Nitrous, Cloud9, Koding etc... all have free tiers. We're working on Nitrous
and definitely will continue to support students as best we can. We recently
launched a native chrome application, and honestly with our chrome application
a $200 chromebook can be a pretty amazing development machine, even for
professional developers.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitrous/efdcneeepl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitrous/efdcneeepllhjlbejkfnaolelbpdacai?hl=en)

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ivan_burazin
I am the founder of Codeanywhere, and I totally agree with ajhit406.

This is why we active support non profits like Coderdojo and Codestarter
(while it was active).

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codinghorror
Looks like they depended on these 199 dollar chromebooks

[http://blog.codestarter.org/how-we-turn-199-chromebooks-
into...](http://blog.codestarter.org/how-we-turn-199-chromebooks-into-ubuntu-
based/)

Was this a business, or a charity? I am not really following here..

~~~
prodmerc
A similar idea is to buy older used laptops (like the HP 2530p/2540p series -
dirt cheap, well built machines) in bulk, refurbish and donate them to
schools. There's quite a few people who do this in developing countries...

