We believe that the key to getting
students excited about computer science is to give them opportunities at ever younger ages to
explore their creativity with computer science. That’s why we’re running the
Google Code-in contest again this year, and today’s the day students can go to
the contest site, register and start looking for tasks that interest
them.
Ignacio Rodriguez was just 10 years old
when he became curious about Sugar, the open source learning platform introduced nationally to students in Uruguay
when he was in elementary school. With the encouragement of his teacher, Ignacio started
asking questions of the developers writing and maintaining the code and he started playing
around with things, a great way to learn to code. When he turned 14 he entered the Google
Code-in contest completing tasks that included writing two new web services for Sugar and he
created four new Sugar activities. He even continued to mentor other students throughout the
contest period. His enthusiasm for coding and making the software even better for
future users earned him a spot as a 2013 Grand Prize Winner.
Ignacio is one of the 1,575 students from
78 countries that have participated in Google Code-in since 2010. We are encouraging 13-17
year old students to explore the many varied ways they can contribute to open source software
development through the Google Code-in contest. Because open source is a collaborative effort,
the contest is designed as a streamlined entry point for students into software development by
having mentors assigned to each task that a student works on during the contest. Students
don’t have to be coders to participate; as with any software project, there are many ways to
contribute to the project. Students will be able to choose from documentation,
outreach, research, training, user interface and quality assurance tasks in addition to coding
tasks.
disaster relief, content management,
desktop environments, gaming, medical record systems for developing countries, 3D solid
modeling computer-aided design and operating systems to name a few.
For more information on the contest,
please visit the contest
site where you
can find the timeline, Frequently Asked Questions and information on each of the open
source projects students can work with during the seven week contest.
