We seriously regret that we need to start raising a fee for Caribou Contests. The whole initial idea for Caribou was to provide free access to interesting mathematics competitions to be a starting point for children to get interested in puzzling and mathematics as was experienced by the main organizer of Caribou in his childhood. For example, Germany has over 800,000 students participate each year (see here). A comparison of the participation in Canada with other countries can be seen on this page.

Why do we need funding?

Although we were able to automate much of our service, the following items require resources:

• the programming of interactive questions which typically takes a qualified student 1-2 months for each single interactive question
• 6 contest days per year, from 2012/13 on with 5 age groups (grades 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, 9-10 and 11/12) requiring many questions to input, illustrate, translate and check
• our telephone hotline and email service before, during and after each contest currently answered by a faculty member during his normal work hours
• an extremely time consuming constant search for funding which to a large extend was without success
• constant programming for increasing safety in using the contest (avoiding crashes, increasing clarity, simplifying the use for teachers, speeding up access to results on the evening of the contest day...)
• investment into future extensions e.g. a physics contest
• cash prizes of $1500 at the end of each year in the previous years

Our attempts to get funding

Brock University

Although all contributers to the contests are students or employees at Brock University, unfortunately it is not possible for Brock to support this contest financially and not by reserving time for work on the contest, for example, by providing any teaching relief. Evenings and weekends usually reserved for research had been partially devoted to contest preparation and other Caribou administration work over the last 4 years.

Online Donations

On the Caribou Donation page, we ask for the last two years for a donation. In the first year 2 donations happened, one from a school and one from a private person. Previous year no donation happened despite over 12,000 students participated last year in over 32,000 contest participation.

Banks and Accounting Firms

We contacted six different banks and a number of accounting companies repeatedly, unfortunately without success.

Prizes

One probably noticed over the previous year how on the Caribou home page we advertised for Kid-Scoop. This company had offered to provide the $1500 prize money if we advertised their logo. Despite many emails were sent and phone calls done, this company defaulted and we had to find the money from elsewhere.

Trillium and FedDev Funding

Different powerful funding agencies (like FedDev Ontario and Trillium) support outreach to children in technology, science and mathematics organized by non-for-profit organizations. Although Brock is registered as a non-for-profit organization, even as a charity, universities are explicitly excluded from these rich funding sources.

PromoScience Grants of NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada)

A funding programme that seems a perfect fit for Caribou is the NSERC PromoScience program. We want to thank all teachers and parents who supported our application from September 2011 with reference letters. Unfortunately our application was ranked 55th whereas 49 projects were funded. The feedback given here left us clueless how this evaluation was reached. Our reply did not lead to a new evaluation. In a Skype video conference NSERC was also not able to give hints what we could do better.