Gigabit Projects Accelerate Open Innovation, Inclusion and Student Engagement

You might have heard of the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund, which provides grants to teachers and technologists who are working to incorporate high-speed internet technologies like virtual reality, artificial intelligence and 4K video streaming into the classroom. What you might not know is how we are building a healthier Internet — through open innovation, web literacy, and digital inclusion — and what other impact these funds are having in communities across the country.

Once grants are given out, grantees have 16 weeks to put their project plans into action. They build and test applications with hardware (virtual reality headsets, 360 cameras, tablets, mobile phones) and software (WebVR, A-Frame, Thimble, Unity game design, etc.) and then pilot them with online and offline community members, many of whom are kindergarten through college students. In the last round of pilots ending last month, grantees piloted their projects with more than 3,250 students! Students were able to learn new things and, in many cases, they were also able to experience early-stage products and give feedback to the developers in order to directly shape the future of gigabit technologies.

The impact of the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund grantee portfolio isn’t just about technology for education and workforce development. The intersection between technology and other sectors is vast and are limited only by one’s imagination. In Round 2, we have continued to see new ways of using technology to impact a variety of verticals including:

• Cultural Understanding: Technology has the power to enhance users’ appreciation and understanding of different cultures in a unique and immersive way. The V Form Alliance, a Mozilla Gigabit grantee in Kansas City, used immersive virtual reality to help students explore sites relevant to African American history from their classrooms.
• PenPal Schools, another grantee in Austin, provided an immersive VR field trip with accompanying curricula and direct peer-to-peer communication with students in the US to Pakistan. Students around the world can now learn about the culture and visually and audibly experience what a typical day is like for a student in a country they likely knew little about prior to participating.
• Environmental Issues and Food Resources: Urban Farming Guys’ Smart Greenhouse used IoT sensors on an aquaponics system to monitor key greenhouse data like water levels, Ph, humidity, and temperature in real-time. These sensors streamed data in real-time, allowing for continuous adjustment to environmental conditions and better food growth outcomes. The Urban Farming guys are using these innovations to grow more food for those in need of fresh produce in Kansas City and well beyond, as they are sharing their open source technologies and methodologies with a growing global network.
• The Giving Garden project in Chattanooga, TN utilized 4K video to live stream the classroom’s incubators to YouTube, allowing students and parents to tune in and watch ducks and chickens hatch in real time. The garden in the classroom also gave back to the community by donating all of the food produced directly back to families in need in the community.
• Healthcare: Technology — and especially connected device innovations like sensors — is changing healthcare and helping to address core community health needs such as aging in place. One Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund grantee worked with their 5th year Master of Architecture students at the University of Kansas’ School of Architecture to build a smart floor. The floor is a prototype of a typical residential flooring system with embedded sensors that is able to collect data on heel strike. Utilizing accelerometers and strain gauges, they are able to monitor activity and detect falls, limp, muscle stutter, dragging of feet, and balance issues. The data can also be used for more advanced gait analysis which can identify and predict such conditions as diabetic neuropathy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and other forms of dementia.
• Civic Engagement: Many cities are investing heavily in the networks and infrastructure that makes many Gigabit innovations possible. In Austin, TX, the Austin Budget Party pilot is enabling middle and high school students to explore civic challenges and priorities through an online, open-source, digital budget debate platform and curriculum.

These are but a few of the impacts the 19 pilots funded this round had. For more, check out this summary of impacts from both of our recent pilot rounds:

Want to expand these impacts to your gigabit city? Interested in exploring more about 4K, VR and other gigabit-fueled technologies along with Mozilla? Stay tuned for the announcement of the next round of new grantees coming October 2017.