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Mitrasree Deb
Undergraduate Student of CSE at Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology

Google Code-in begins for students from November 28, 2016

For the seventh consecutive year, Google Code-in will give students (age limit: 13 to 17) a chance to explore open source. Students will find opportunities to learn and get hands on experience with tasks from a range of categories. This structure allows students to stretch themselves as they take on increasingly more challenging tasks.

In a nutshell, It’s a contest introducing teenagers to open source development.

Image Credit : Google Code-in G+ Profile

Google Code-in is for students asking questions like:

  • What is open source?
  • What kinds of stuff do open source projects do?
  • How can I write real code when all I’ve done is a little classroom work?
  • Can I contribute even if I’m not really a programmer?

Well ! Google Code-in is a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students ages 13–17) with the goal of encouraging young people to participate in open source.

For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development. For Google Code-in there are different open source organizations, each of whom has experience mentoring students in the Google Summer of Code program, to provide “bite sized” tasks for participating students to complete.

Getting started is easy: once the contest begins, simply choose an interesting task from the participating organizations’ lists and complete it. Mentors from the organizations are available to help online.

The tasks are grouped into the following categories:

  1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
  2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing tasks 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

Students earn one point for each task completed. Students will receive a digital certificate for completing one task and can earn a t-shirt when they complete three tasks. At the end of the contest each of the open source organizations will name two (2) grand prize winners for their organization based upon the students’ body of work. The Grand Prize winners will receive a trip to Google’s Mountain View, California, USA Headquarters for themselves and a parent or legal guardian for an award ceremony, an opportunity to meet with Google engineers, explore the Google campus and have a fun day in the San Francisco sun.

Image Source

How to prepare :

  • Check the contest timeline :

After the announcement of mentoring organizations on November 7,2016, contest will be opened for accepting entries by student participants on November 28,2016. Meanwhile the students can check the projects provided by the organizations.The contest will end on January 16,2017. So, all the tasks must be submitted by the students before January 16,2017. The detailed timeline can be found here : Google Code-in 2016 Timeline.

  • Prepare yourself for the challenge :

Google Code-in is announced today but it will get started from November 28,2016. So, You have a lot of time to prepare yourself. You can utilize this time by-

  1. As the mentoring organizations are not announced yet, you can check the organizations from last year . Check the *view info* button beside each of their names. Also by checking their websites ,you will get a good insight on their tasks(last year’s task list).
  2. Tasks don’t need to be limited to coding! Tasks can be pretty much anything, including QA, marketing, design, usability, documentation, research etc.
  3. For coding tasks, it’s safe to assume some level of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP knowledge. These languages are quite easy to learn. Codecademy , w3schools have well-explained instructions on these languages.
  4. You may need to work with some version control tools like git as well. Here are some links that may help you : Hasin Hayder’s Git Tutorial in Bengali , Version Control by Data School, Git-SVN Crash Course.
  • Participate, learn & explore the beauty of code :

That’s the main focus of this whole program actually. After the completion of the program, you will be someone different from the former “YOU” with some sort of coding skills having a lot of confidence! ❤