By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog It’s time to announce this year’s 20 grand prize winners in the Google Code-in 2013 contest. Over the last seven weeks, 337 teenagers from 46 countries have been busy working with open source organizations to write code, fix bugs, create documentation and find creative ways to get other students interested in participating in open source, completing a total of 2,113 tasks. Congratulations to all of the students who participated in this year’s contest! You should all be very proud of yourselves.

Each of the 10 open source organizations that worked with students during the contest chose 2 students to be their organization’s grand prize winners based on the students’ comprehensive body of work.

The grand prize winners are listed below alphabetically (by first name) with their country and the organization that they worked with during Google Code-in 2013.

Akshaykumar Kalose, United States - Sahana Software Foundation
Anurag Sharma, India - Sahana Software Foundation
Benjamin Kaiser, Australia - KDE
Chirayu Desai, India - RTEMS
Dalimil Hájek, Czech Republic - Apertium
Daniel Ramirez, United States - RTEMS
Freeman Lou, United States - Haiku
Ignacio Rodríguez, Uruguay - Sugar Labs
Jacob Burroughs, United States - BRL-CAD
Jorge Alberto Gómez López, El Salvador - Sugar Labs
Mark Klein, United States - Drupal
Mateusz Maćkowski, Poland - Wikimedia
Matt Habel, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Mikhail Ivchenko, Russian Federation - KDE
Peter Amidon, United States - BRL-CAD
Puck Meerburg, Netherlands - Haiku
Samuel Kim, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Sushain Cherivirala, United States - Apertium
Theo Patt, United States - Wikimedia
Vijay Nandwani, India - Drupal

Congratulations to these 20 pre-university students who completed a remarkable 650 tasks during the contest. We asked the students to tell us a bit about their favorite tasks they worked on in the contest and here are descriptions of a few of the tasks in the students’ words:

The task was about creating a screencast of coding a Hello world module for Drupal 8. It was an ordinary task but it helped me gain recognition in the whole Drupal community. The video was also appreciated and discussed on social networks. -- Vijay Nandwani 

One of my favorite tasks was revamping the "other languages" feature on the mobile Wikipedia, for which I both added features and noticeably reduced page load times. -- Theo Patt 

My favorite task was to modify DriveSetup to make the window zoom-able. It seemed like a simple task but I was still unfamiliar with the Haiku API, so there was a bit of challenge to it. -- Freeman Lou 

I added support for new types of Flickr URLs for UploadWizard extension for MediaWiki. -- Mateusz Maćkowski

For their grand prize trip the 20 students will be flown to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters along with a parent or legal guardian in mid April for a four night trip. Students will talk with Google engineers, take part in an awards ceremony, enjoy time exploring San Francisco and best of all make new friends also interested in technology and open source development.

We have a special surprise in store for this year’s grand prize winners -- each year the students tell us they’d like to meet the mentors that they worked with during the contest so this year we are doing just that -- one mentor from each organization will be joining the students on the grand prize trip.

A huge thanks to all of the students, mentors, organization administrators, teachers and parents who made Google Code-in 2013 awesome.


Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross posted from the Official Google Blog

Today marks the start of Google Code-in, a global online contest for pre-university students (13-17 years old) interested in learning more about open source software. Participating students have an opportunity to work on real world software projects and earn cool prizes for their effort.

For the next seven weeks students from around the world will be able to choose from an extensive list of tasks created by 10 open source projects. Some tasks require coding in a variety of programming languages, creating documentation, doing marketing outreach or working on user interfaces.

Participants earn points for each task they successfully complete to win T-shirts and certificates. At the end of the contest, 20 students will be selected as grand prize winners and flown to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Winners will receive a trip to San Francisco, a tour of the Googleplex and a chance to meet with Google engineers.

More than 1,200 students from 71 countries and 730 schools have participated in Google Code-in over the past three years. Last year, our 20 grand prize winners came from 12 countries on five continents!

We hope this year’s participants will enjoy learning about open source development while building their technical skills and making an impact on these organizations. Please review our program site for contest rules, frequently asked questions and to get started!

Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Carol Smith and Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

At Google we are passionate about introducing students from around the world to open source software development. Since 2005, Google has worked with over 10,000 students and over 440 open source projects in a variety of fields to create more code for the masses.

A call out to all students: if you have ever thought it would be cool to write code and see it make a difference in the world then please keep reading. We are excited to announce the next editions of  two programs designed to introduce students to open source software development, Google Summer of Code (for university students) and Google Code-in (for 13-17 year old students).

Google Summer of Code 

Back in 2005, Google made a commitment to support open source software contributors. In addition to our other programs to build and support the contributor base, we thought a great way to increase awareness was to introduce the wide world of open source to college students. Google Summer of Code was born: match student developers from around the world with open source software organizations to work on a project while on break from their universities. 

With over 8,300 mentors in 100 countries around the world, the 8,500 student developers have produced a stunning 50 million lines of code. The program will now be reaching its 10th instance in 2014. 

We told you on the Official Google Blog just a few highlights of what we’ll be up to this year, and now we want to tell you all the details:  

1. 10 visits to countries with high participation throughout the year.
2. 10 developer events in promotion of the program. 
3. 10 mentors who have participated in Google Summer of Code will be featured on our open source blog.
4. 10% additional student stipend (a total of $5500 for students who successfully complete the whole program).
5. 10% more students than we’ve ever had participate in the program before.
6. 10 more mentoring organizations than we’ve ever had in the program will be participating in Google Summer of Code 2014
7. 10 year student reunion event will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus next year for all the students who have participated in the program. 
8. 10 year reunion mentor summit will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus for all our Google Summer of Code organization alumni.
9. 10 students/organizations will be chosen to highlight their work at the Google booths at open source events throughout the year.
10. 10 student projects from the past nine years will be highlighted on the open source blog and YouTube.

We’re pleased to be running a program that touches a lot of lives around the world, and we hope this will be a celebration of all the accomplishments we’ve seen from so many of our participants. Watch this blog for announcements about our travel and our efforts over the next year. Here’s to 10 Things! 

Google Code-in - Program starts for students November 18th

For the fourth consecutive year we are thrilled to announce Google Code-in, an international contest designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source development. Open source projects are about more than just coding, and this contest highlights a variety of ways to contribute to open source projects. Every year, open source software is becoming more important around the globe; from government, healthcare, relief efforts, gaming, to large tech companies and everything in between. 

When you read the term open source do you think:

• What is open source?
• What types of work do open source projects do?
• I’ve only taken one computer science class, can I contribute to an open source project?
• I’m not really into coding, what else can I do to contribute to open source?
• I’ve never participated in open source or an online contest before, can someone help guide me?
• Open source sounds cool, how can I get started?

If you’ve wondered about any of these questions and are a pre-university student (age 13-17) then we hope you will join in the fun and excitement of the Google Code-in contest starting Monday, November 18th. 

The different categories of tasks that students will be able to work on include:

1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
3. Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Over the past 3 years we have had over 1200 students from 71 countries complete tasks in the contest. In April, we flew the 20 Google Code-in 2012 Grand Prize winners and a parent to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters for a 5 day/4 night trip where they enjoyed talking with Google engineers, an awards ceremony, a Google campus tour, and a full day of fun in San Francisco. 

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in 2013 site for more details on how to sign up and participate. And please help us spread the word to your friends around the globe! If you are a teacher that would like to encourage your students to participate, please send an email to our team at [email protected]. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have. 

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. We will announce the 10 open source organizations that will be participating in the contest on November 1. The Google Code-in contest starts for students on November 18, 2013. We look forward to welcoming hundreds of students from around the world into the open source family again this year.

We hope you will help us spread the word about these two programs to all the pre-university and university students in your life. Stay tuned to this blog for more announcements in the coming weeks about both programs.


Written by Carol Smith and Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor