Tag Archives: gci

Introducing the Google Code-in 2015 Mentoring Organizations

Today we are happy to announce the 14 open source organizations that are participating as mentoring organizations for Google Code-in 2015! The contest, entering its sixth year, introduces 13-17 year old pre-university students to open source software development, giving them the opportunity to take the skills they have been learning in the classroom and apply them to a real open source software project. Experienced mentors are available to help the students if they have questions while working on each task.


Google Code-in officially starts for students on December 7, but before the contest begins, students can learn more about each of the mentoring organizations by clicking on the links below.
  • GCI vertical. 1142x994dp.png
    Apertium - rule-based machine translation platform
  • Copyleft Games Group - building game development platforms for tomorrow
  • Drupal -  content management platform
  • FOSSASIA - developing communities across all ages and borders to form a better future with Open Technologies and ICT
  • Haiku - operating system specifically targeting personal computing
  • KDE -  team that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing
  • MetaBrainz - builds community maintained databases
  • OpenMRS - open source medical records system for the world
  • RTEMS - operating system used in satellites, particle accelerators, robots, racing motorcycles, medical devices and more
  • SCoRe - research lab that seeks sustainable solutions for problems faced by developing countries
  • Sugar Labs -  learning platform and activities for elementary education
  • Systers -  community for women involved in the technical aspects of computing
  • Ubuntu - open source operating system
  • Wikimedia Foundation - non-profit foundation dedicated to bringing free content to the world, operating Wikipedia


The mentoring organizations are currently busy creating hundreds of coding, documentation, user interface, quality assurance, outreach, research, and training tasks. The contest officially starts for students on Monday, December 7th at 9:00 PST.

For important contest information please check out the contest site for Contest Rules, Frequently Asked Questions and Important Dates. You can also find flyers and other helpful information including the new Getting Started Guide on the contest site. Join our announcement and discussion lists to talk with other students, mentors and organization administrators about the contest. For questions about eligibility or other general questions, you can contact us at [email protected].

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Dozen of one, half dozen of the other: the 6th Google Code-in and 12th Google Summer of Code are on!

Since 2005, our Open Source Programs Office has enabled 11,000+ students, ranging in age from 13 to 56, to explore open source software development. They’ve worked hands-on with over 515 projects across a variety of disciplines.

If you’re a student looking to learn new coding skills that can help make a difference, check out our upcoming programs: Google Code-in for students 13-17 and Google Summer of Code for university students.

Google Code-in - Program starts for students December 7, 2015

For the sixth year in a row, Google Code-in will give 13-17 year old pre-university students an opportunity to dive in and explore the world of open source. Students with many different skills -- coders and non-coders alike -- will find opportunities to learn by doing and earn prizes. It’s easy to get started: just choose an interesting task from our participating organizations’ lists and complete it under the guidance of a mentor.


GCI-logo generic no border.pngGoogle 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 coder?


With tasks in five different categories, there’s something to fit almost any student’s skills:
  • Code: writing or refactoring
  • Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
  • Outreach/research: community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
  • Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
  • User Interface: user experience research or user interface design and interaction
GCI 2014 Grand Prize Winners on the Google Campus

Over 2,200 students from 87 countries have taken part in Google Code-in, and we’re excited to welcome many more into this year’s edition. We’ll be announcing this year’s participating organizations on November 13th, so stay tuned.



Google Summer of Code - Student applications open on March 14, 2016
GSoC logos from the last 10 years
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for a wide variety of carefully selected open source projects while under the guidance of mentors. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all. Over the past 11 years, over 8,300 mentors and 8,500 student developers in 101 countries have produced a stunning 55 million lines of code.


500+ GSoC Students and Mentors


We’re proud to continue this tradition for another year: we’ll be welcoming another batch of students into Google Summer of Code 2016. We’ll be accepting applications from open source organizations in February and student applications from March 14 - 25, 2016 so it’s not too early to start thinking about proposals.


Spread the word to your friends and stay tuned for more details coming soon!


By Stephanie Taylor and Carol Smith, Open Source Programs Office

My sweet adventures with Sugar Labs and Google Code-in

Today we have a guest post from Sam Parkinson, a 15 year-old Google Code-in 2014 grand prize winner. Sam worked with Sugar Labs for two instances of Google Code-in and tells us more about his journey navigating the world of free and open source software. We hope this is only the beginning of Sam’s contributions.
Ever since I was young, naive and enjoying my first tastes of Linux, I've wanted to contribute to the FOSS community. For me, Google Code-in (GCI) made that dream come true. I was lucky enough to be able to participate for the last two years with the mentoring organization Sugar Labs.

Sugar Labs is a “desktop environment without a desktop” that uses Python. Officially, Sugar Labs is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with an equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar Labs activities are used every school day by nearly 3 million children in more than 40 countries.

I started my FOSS journey in GCI 2013 by completing the simple task of changing a ValueError to a logged exception. At first, my confidence level went from "yeah, I know some cool Python tricks" to "omg! how do I code?". I discovered new (and sometimes confusing) things like PEP8, git-branch and mailing lists. However, having the GCI and Sugar Labs communities as a support system made my dream of contributing to FOSS manageable by breaking it up into small, manageable tasks.

I worked on some pretty cool features, like adding a nutcracker-style mode in a Speak activity, where users could insert a picture of a face and have it talk to them.
I also worked on some not-so-fun tasks, like fixing bugs caused by GTK updates while trying not to break compatibility with ancient versions. But by the end of GCI 2014, I had learned how to pass code reviews and even completed some of my own. Hopefully I’ve programmed something that has made somebody smile.

In 2014, I was lucky enough to be chosen as a GCI winner. The grand prize trip was the cherry on top of the proverbial cake. I got to meet the amazing people I'd been hacking with, plus some pretty inspiring people from Google and other FOSS projects. I found it mind blowing to actually talk with people about programming face to face, and even better to sit around laughing about the programming culture. A highlight of the trip was meeting Walter Bender, one of the Sugar Labs mentors. Together we hacked on a project improving the Sugar Labs website. It’s not done, but it’s in better shape than it was before, and I can claim that I did some coding during the trip.

GCI was truly something that changed my life. I went from being an open source newbie to being able to contribute to really cool projects, thanks to the amazing GCI and Sugar Labs communities. It's something that I would recommend any young programmer consider doing. Participating in GCI is something that can make dreams come true.

By Sam Parkinson, Google Code-in grand prize winner