CodeYard Project Status

Open-Source software development for students in secondary education

The CodeYard project of the Radboud University of Nijmegen is acknowlegded to be very successful: the aims of the project are all met, within planned time-frame and budget, and more people were reached.

The participating groups had a broader background than initially planned: next to secondary school students, also groups of students of colleges and universities joined the community. Also geographically, the project became broader then in the initial plans: participants from other Dutch speaking countries (Belgium and the Dutch Antilles) were joining in. Interest was expressed from France as well. CodeYard has become a synonym for innovative education. In this sense CodeYard can be seen as an incubator of Open Source in educational world.

Participants use the materials provided by CodeYard, and add their project results on CodeYard platform. Besides, they are seen to actively help each other with realizing projects. To support these communications, the project team organised a number of meetings for the participants to meet.

Quite a lot of publicity coverage was reached by the project team: Linux Magazine, Vives, TINFON, NRC Handelsblad, Linux.com, Livre.nl are the examples thereof.

Taking in account the success of the project, the Radboud University and NLnet agreed to sponsor the next stage of CodeYardi: the way to self-sustainability. NLnet will support CodeYard with 70.000€, until August 2008. CodeYard should be a self-supporting activity by that time. The focus in the coming period will be on attrackting even more publicity, binding new sponsors, and collecting the means necessary to continue the activity on permanent basis.