Google Code-in 2011

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 code
2. 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.

Student applications now being accepted for Google Summer of Code


Today marks the start of the 2011 Google Summer of Code student application period.

Google Summer of Code is a global program where university students are given a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Google Summer of Code is a highly competitive program with a limited number of students being accepted. We are pleased to announce that this year we have enlarged the program so that we can accept as many as 150 additional students. We hope all interested students will apply!

Now it is time for the students to submit their proposals to the accepted mentoring organizations via the Google Summer of Code program website from today through Friday, April 8th 19:00 UTC. For the past 10 days students have had the opportunity to review the Ideas pages for this year’s 175 accepted projects and to research which projects they would like to contribute to for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

Every year we have thousands of students who apply for the Google Summer of Code program but due to the limited number of slots many students are not able to be a part of the program. The quality of your proposal is what will make you stand out from your peers. Students should consult the Google Summer of Code student manual for suggestions on how to write a proposal that will grab the attention of the mentoring organizations. Multiple proposals are allowed but we highly recommend focusing on quality over quantity. The mentoring organizations have many proposals to review, so it is important to follow each organization’s specific guidelines or templates and we advise you to submit your proposal early so you can receive timely feedback.

For more tips, see a list of some helpful dos and don’ts for successful student participation written by a group of experienced Google Summer of Code administrators, our user’s guide for the program site, Frequently Asked Questions and timeline. You can also stay up-to-date on all things Google Summer of Code on our Google Open Source blog, mailing lists or on IRC at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck students and remember to submit your proposals early–you only have until April 8!