Open Source Software Development Internship with SKid
About Skid: Professor Arun Mehta showcased a new software to provide free of cost communication support to children with special needs and all those who have difficulty with the keyboard and mouse. The software is called Skid (short for Special Kid). skid.org.in is home to a large group of software modules that children can use from any PC or mobile phone with access to the web. It is also a unique platform for learning web programming. The first module which has recently been made available online is co-designed by students from JMIT, Radaur, and allows special kids access to Wikipedia.
The Skid initiative (documented at arpitblog.wordpress.com) is only a modest beginning in affording communication opportunities to large numbers of children with special needs, in that it is a process for developing such software on an ongoing basis, in an inclusive, participatory manner. In developing the words module, for instance, the team has tried to work with the dyslexic, to make a smarter spell checker that allows dyslexic kids to work with sounds and pictures in selecting the right word.
Summer Internship: Given diverse kinds of disability, even within autism, cerebral palsy and dyslexia, and the different ways in which children might wish to use computers, there is an ongoing need to keep adding modules, and finding imaginative new ways to combine them.
To address this need, the Skid initiative invites college students who know programming (Ruby on Rails) to undergo free (no remuneration) summer training in which they write software that doesn’t just gather dust, but is put onto the web. Not only do they have the satisfaction that thousands of kids from around the world are benefiting from what they wrote, they also receive public credit on the page they helped design.
So if you are passionate about helping others by developing software that makes their life better and ready to work free of cost for this initiative go to skid.org.in and take contact details on site to apply. Apply only if you are genuinely interested and have programming knowledge on Ruby on Rails.