Devin Finzer learned the value of data exploration and visualization early. His father, Bill Finzer, led the Fathom Dynamic Data Software development team at KCP Technologies and has been leading the development of the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) at the Concord Consortium since 2014. Thanks to Devin Finzer’s generous gift of nearly $2 million to the Concord Consortium, CODAP will undergo a huge makeover from the ground up.
CODAP includes a robust suite of features, tools, and plugins for data exploration and visualization and is widely popular. Over 2.5 million users in schools around the world have explored local and global data—from data about crops to climate, earthquakes, education, and more. Data fluency—the ability to explore, interpret, visualize, and transform data into actionable next steps—is critical for both STEM learners and future STEM workers as well as for participation in modern society.
Devin Finzer, the co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, the world’s largest marketplace for non-fungible tokens, says, “I’m extremely excited to support the better use of data in the classroom, and CODAP is an incredible open-source project furthering this effort. As a CODAP user myself, I’m a huge fan of the work the team has done to make the software accessible, fun, and engaging.”
CODAP is free, open-source, web-based software aimed at bringing data fluency to everyone, especially learners in grades 5-14. With this financial support, we are now re-engineering CODAP to modernize its underlying source code with up-to-date web application development tools, including Typescript, React, and D3. Our goal is to provide a fully open, flexible, and customizable online learning platform that will support data science education for years to come and ensure that CODAP is maintainable and extendable by an open-source ecosystem.
This new funding will also support community building—from software engineers at the Concord Consortium to outside contributors to CODAP’s open-source code base, collaborators who integrate CODAP in curriculum development and educational research, K-12 students and teachers, community-based citizen science projects, higher education faculty, and more.
We hope to strengthen and support a self-sustaining community with documentation for developers, guidance for extending CODAP’s capabilities through plugins, a dedicated YouTube channel of video tutorials, webinars, and a conference of CODAP users. Throughout the development process, we will partner with dozens of organizations to ensure CODAP continues to meet the needs of learners and programs that seek a free, open-source, and extensible data learning platform.
Bill Finzer says, “Devin has always been a supporter of our work. His gift takes his support to a new level, for which I’m extremely grateful. This important contribution will help ensure a bright future for data science education with CODAP.”
For more information, contact codap@concord.org.