Google Code-in: Are you in?
By Carol Smith, Google Code-in Program Manager, Open
Source TeamCross-posted from the Google
Open Source Blog
Listen up, future coders
of the world: today we’re launching the second annual
Google Code-in
competition, an open source development contest for 13-17 year old students around the world.
The purpose of the Google Code-in competition is to give students everywhere an opportunity to
explore the world of open source development. We not only run open source software throughout
our business, we also value the way the open source model encourages people to work together
on shared goals over the Internet.
Open source development involves
much more than just computer programming, and the Google Code-in competition reflects that by
having lots of different tasks to choose from. We organize the tasks into eight major
categories:
1. Code: Writing or
refactoring code2. Documentation: Creating and editing documents
3. Outreach: Community
management and outreach, as well as marketing
4. Quality Assurance: Testing and
ensuring code is of high quality
5. Research: Studying a problem and recommending
solutions
6. Training: Helping others learn more
7. Translation:
Localization (adapting code to your region and language)
8. User interface: User
experience research or user interface design and interaction
On
November 9, we’ll announce the participating mentoring organizations. Mentoring organizations
are open source software organizations chosen from a pool of applicants who have participated
in our
Google Summer of
Code program in the past. Last year we had
20
organizations participate.
Last year’s competition drew
361
participating students from 48 countries, who worked for two months on a wide
variety of brain-teasing tasks ranging from coding to video editing, all in support of open
source software. In January, we announced the
14
grand prize winners, who we flew to our headquarters in Mountain View, California to
enjoy
a day talking to Google engineers and learning what it’s like to work at Google, and
another day enjoying the northern California sights and sun.
Visit the
Frequently
Asked Questions page on the
Google Code-in
site for more details on how to sign up and participate. Our goal this year is to
have even more pre-university students in the contest than last time around, so help us spread
the word, too.
Stay tuned to the
contest site and
subscribe to our
mailing list for more updates
on the contest. The Google Code-in contest starts on
November 21, 2011,
and we look forward to seeing the clever and creative ways all of the participants tackle
their open source challenges.
Carol Smith is
Google Code-in Program Manager, Open Source TeamPosted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
