Visit the Google Code-in site for more details about this year's program. For a detailed timeline of important events for this year’s program and more information please review our Frequently Asked Questions.
What is Google Code-in 2011?
Following on the success of the Google Summer of Code program for university students, the 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. A similar program, the Google Highly Open Participation contest ran in 2007, and in 2010 we changed the format slightly and the Google Code-in program was born.
For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development. For Google Code-in we work with 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.
The tasks are grouped into the following categories:
- Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
- Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
- Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
- Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
- Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
- Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
- Translation: Tasks related to localization
- User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction
Students earn points based on the difficulty and time required to complete the tasks. Students will receive tee shirts and cash prizes based upon the number of tasks they complete. The ten students with the highest number of points at the end of the contest will receive a trip to Google’s Mountain View, California, USA Headquarters for an award ceremony for themselves and a parent or legal guardian.
The contest ran from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012. Stay tuned to our Open Source at Google blog for more updates on the contest.