Google Code-In
Why Code-In? Why not!
What is Code-In?
Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development. Since 2010, over 4500 students from 99 countries have completed work in the contest.
Okay, but what is Open Source?
Open-source software is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
Seems interesting? Google makes it more.
Google Code-in is often the first experience, many students have with open source, the contest is designed to make it easy and fun for students to begin with. List of tasks is provided for students to work on during the seven week contest period.
Who makes or provide these tasks?
Google chose Open Source Organisations which provide tasks to students. There are 25 organisations like CCExtractor, MovingBlocks and many more.
A unique part of the contest is that each task has mentors assigned from the organization to get help from. You will find the most polite mentors and instructors here! While, this is the first experience to such a great thing, Open Source, interesting and fascinating tasks invigorate students to dive into it. Missed something? Something isn't clear? Have a doubt? Just ask your mentor via. chat, mail or forum, as easy as that!
Students, you can choose tasks you wish to work on from the following categories: coding, documentation, training, outreach, research, quality assurance and user interface. You will earn prizes for your successful completion of the tasks!
Why Google focus on Open Source?
You not only have the opportunity to work on a real open source software project, thus gaining invaluable experience, but you also have the opportunity to be a part of the open source community. Mentors are readily available to help answer their questions while they work through the tasks. When communities form around share challenges, the diversity of ideas that naturally emerges, surfaces better solutions than if the marketplace of ideas was limited to just a organization, meaning developers are working smarter. Exposing the problem space to other interested organizations provides additional human capital to tackle the challenge, meaning the solution has more developer hours thrown at it, at no additional cost to a Organisation. Finally, "more users means more use cases being explored, which means more robust code."
Google Code-in is a contest so there are prizes! Complete one task and receive a digital certificate. Three completed tasks and you’ll also get a fun Google t-shirt. Finalists get a hoodie. Grand Prize winners receive an all expense paid trip to Google headquarters in California!
