You may have noticed that Oppia’s creator dashboard is looking better, and that the site has gotten faster. This is due to the efforts of Vishal Gupta and Avijit Gupta, both of whom have just completed a 3-month stint with Oppia as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a Google program which enables students to take part in actively developing open source projects during their summer months.
This is Oppia’s first year participating in GSoC, and it was a blast! Many more students eagerly flocked to our ideas page than we had expected, and our Gitter channel was full of people saying hello, looking for starter projects, and asking for help with setting up a local Oppia server. We received dozens of emails asking for clarifications on our suggested projects, or reviews on early project proposals by students. In the end, we received 40 proposals, with a couple proposing new projects entirely or going beyond the ideas we had originally suggested.
As a first-time organization, we were offered two student slots. Figuring out which candidates should fill these slots was a difficult process, and involved multiple rounds of review and debate. In the end, we selected Avijit Gupta and Vishal Gupta to work on the creator dashboard and improving Oppia’s performance, respectively — we regard these projects as fundamentally important for the platform, and are very excited to see them coming to a conclusion.
Both Avijit and Vishal had access to multiple mentors who could help them throughout the summer. We’d like to thank all the individuals who mentored, reviewed applications, or were otherwise responsible for Oppia’s successful participation in GSoC this year: Allan Zhou, Ben Henning, Bren Briggs, Jacob Davis, Madiyar Aitbayev, Sean Lip, and Xinyu Wu. We’re also very grateful to Google for allowing our organization to participate in the program, and would like to extend our largest thanks to both Vishal and Avijit for their efforts throughout the summer.
Oppia hopes to return next summer in GSoC 2017. If you’d like to subscribe to news and updates about Oppia’s participation in GSoC, you can sign up to the oppia-gsoc-announce mailing list — or, if you’re already feeling enthusiastic, you can start helping out right away. In the meantime, stay tuned for upcoming blog posts by Avijit and Vishal sharing their individual GSoC experiences!
