Shoes has amazing potential to make coding fun and easy to start with. Unfortunately the original C version proved to be unmaintainable. The project has chosen for a fresh start, creating a new, clean implementation in pure Ruby, which is to become the fourth major release of the toolkit.
This is important for the long term health of the project, and Shoes 4 features a pluggable backend architecture, so different low level windowing toolkits can be easily hooked up. This will ensure that Shoes is viable and can stay relevant in different contexts. The project's contributors are currently uniting forces and working hard to finish a reference implementation using SWT on the JVM.
Starting a rewrite has set us back in time though, and Shoes would really benefit from a little push to get us over the line. Students could help by focusing on individual subsystems, or by improving compatibility with the old implementation. We hope that with the help of GSoC, we will be able to release Shoes 4 sooner, so people can start coding and creating awesome stuff with it. Ruby has been lacking a proper way to do GUIs for quite some time now, and Shoes 4 will fill that gap. We also want to be sure that Shoes 4 supports Hackety Hack, so that project too can see better support and greater adoption.
It's all about empowering people, really.