Educator grants available for PyCon Canada 2013

[Michael DiBernardo]

Hi all,

Thanks to Shopify, we are able to sponsor a few highschool educators to come to PyCon Canada 2013 -- the goal is for them to take their learnings from the conference and to potentially pass down those lessons to their students. 

We could really use your help in sourcing good candidates for these grants -- please send to all your education-y friends!

Thanks!

-Debo

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PyCon Canada is Canada's national conference focused on the Python programming language, which we are holding for the second time from August 9th-13th, 2013 in Toronto, Ontario. 

We held the first PyCon Canada in November of 2012, which attracted top-tier speakers and over 200 developers, educators, and learners. We also offered a Diversity Grant program, by which individuals of underrepresented groups in the Python community could apply for funding to attend.

This year, we are growing to a capacity of 350+, and we've already been heralded for our focus on diversity -- 2 of our 3 keynotes and 50% of our featured speakers list are women (http://pycon.ca/learn). 

We wanted to go a bit further, though, and bring the learning opportunities available on the ground at PyCon Canada to educators from remote communities who generally do not have access to top-tier technology conferences.

If you are a highschool educator in computer science or a related field, we would invite you to apply for one of our "educator grants" by contacting us at bo...@pycon.ca with the following :

- Telling us a bit about yourself
- supplying a short paragraph on why you would like to attend
- The estimated cost of travel (i.e. cost of your transportation only) to and from Toronto for the period of Aug 9-11th, 2013

We are especially interested in applications from teachers who are from remote or underprivileged communities, or who would otherwise have difficulty accessing and attending a top-tier tech conference in North America.

Education is a huge emphasis at PyCon Canada 2013 this year:
- one of our keynotes Karen Brennan researches the ways in which learning communities support young people's development as computational creators.
- We are holding a webmaker workshop for youth aged 12-18 
- Several talks will be focused on education and on introductory Python concepts

We hope that by attending PyCon Canada 2013, highschool educators can take the lessons learned and relationships forged at our conference and disseminate them to their students and colleagues in their home communities.

If you have any questions about this program, please don't be shy -- contact us at bo...@pycon.ca.