Google’s Code-In Contest will start on Monday to motivate the development of open source among teenagers.
“We hope you’ll spend your winter (or summer, for our friends in the southern hemisphere) learning about the ins and outs of open source development through hands-on experience,” Stephanie Taylor, Google Digital Librarian, said in a blog post on Tuesday.
Competing in a 50 day-long challenge, participants will face the task of writing and refactoring codes, creating and editing training and outreaches with community management.
They will also get practical with case studies to make recommendations, as well as test and ensure codes in the quality check field. Interaction with the user experience and interface design will also be incorporated.
Scoring will take place on a one point for one task basis. For each trio of task completions, contestants will earn a T-shirt. After the 50 days, each of the 10 open source participating organisations will name two grand prize winners based on performance.
Prizes include a trip to Google’s Mountain View in California and the exploration of the Google campus.
Participating organisations include SugarLabs, Haiku, Copyleft Games Group, The Fedora Project and Sahana Software Foundation.
All 13 to 17 year-olds are invited to join the Google Code of Summer, of which the contest is one part. The programme aims to supply opportunities to developers over 18 years old. The initiative has been running since 2005, with over 3,000 mentors and 100 countries taking part.
In last year’s contest, 542 students from 56 countries and 360 schools competed with a final count of 3,054 completed tasks.
The competition starts at 7pm South African Standard Time (SAST), online entries are available at the official contest site.
