Kansas City fast-Internet education projects get more funding

A new round of financing announced this week will help educational programs designed to capitalize on the area’s super-fast Internet access.

The Mozilla Foundation, which helped launch the Gigabit Community Fund in 2014 with a half-million dollars in grants, said it had received a three-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Of that, $150,000 will be granted to Kansas City programs in the next year in conjunction with Hive Kansas City, a network of schools, non-profits, designers and developers.

The fund also has helped projects in Chattanooga, Tenn., and plans to choose three more cities to expand to with the new money, Lindsey Frost, a community catalyst for the foundation, said Thursday. The fund expects to choose the cities, and to solicit proposals for the next Kansas City area grants, in the next few months.

She said the initial projects had shown how high-speed connections such as those provided by Google Fiber could connect people across a city.

One Kansas City project the initial grants helped was Gigabots, she said, which allowed students working on robots at different schools to have “really remote control” of robots at other locations over the Internet, and without time lags because their connections were so fast.

And by adding more cities, “we want to see how we can spread innovations across communities to build a national system,” Frost said. And besides fostering new uses for high-speed Internet, “we hope to have a portfolio of ideas the new cities can run with right away.”

This story was originally published September 17, 2015 at 10:49 AM with the headline "Kansas City fast-Internet education projects get more funding."