The Shuttleworth Foundation has cancelled its Kusasa project, which aimed to provide schoolchildren with free modelling software, citing practical and skills-related problems.
Principal advisor Helen King says the foundation decided to cancel the project when it became apparent success would depend on teachers developing skills "we did not initially anticipate".
"Teachers would need to develop confidence in the Etoys modelling environment used by Kusasa in order to effectively manage classroom interaction," King says. "The original vision placed very low demands on the teachers and was to some extent intended to remedy individual teacher challenges.
"We're not afraid to take risks on new ideas or projects and we're not afraid to tell the world when they've gone wrong and failed."
Another challenge arose from the need to provide instructive material to develop skills. It was almost immediately apparent that children would need to be familiar with the modelling tools in order to apply them. This meant creating materials to teach the tools, adding a further level of complexity, King notes.
However, the cloud does have a silver lining: all resources generated by Kusasa have been donated to schools and made openly available online.
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