Google Teen Coding Contest Launches Nov. 26

Posted in: Event

Google has announced that its third annual Google Code-In contest for teenagers will kick off Nov. 26.

Google Code-In is an international contest to introduce 13- to 17-year-old pre-university students to open-source software development. Prizes include certificates and T-shirts, and 20 grand-prize winners will win an all-expenses-paid trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., next spring for themselves and a parent or legal guardian. Last year, 542 students from 56 countries participated.

From late November to mid January, students will be able to work with 10 open source projects on a variety of tasks. These projects have all successfully served as mentoring organizations working with university students in our Google Summer of Code program.

The types of tasks students will be working on will fall into the following categories:

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

“Over the last two years we have had 904 students compete in the contest from 65 countries,” said Stephanie Taylor, a program manager in the open-source team at Google, in a blog post. “This past January we announced the 10 Grand Prize Winners for the 2011 Google Code-In. In June, we flew the winners and a parent/legal guardian to Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters for a five-day/four-night trip, complete with an awards ceremony, talks with Google engineers, Google campus tour and a full day of fun in San Francisco.”