Like many savvy IT companies, Google has realized that when it comes to interesting students in computing, college is just too late. For this reason, Google has announced the Highly Open Participation Contest to help introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development.
For the past three years college students have participated in Google Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/) which has introduced hundreds of college students to open source software. The Google Highly Open Participation Contest, however, will be the first contest from Google’s open source team exclusively for secondary school and high school students.
Students can now visit http://code.google.com/opensource to write code and documentation, prepare training materials, conduct user-experience research, and win prizes. Ten grand-prize winners will get the chance to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, Ca.
Google will work with ten open source organizations (Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS) for this pilot effort, each of which will provide a list of tasks to be completed by the student participants. Tasks typically fall into the following categories: code, documentation, research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user interface.
The contest is open to students aged 13 and older who have not yet begun university studies. Contestants will be able to claim tasks until 12:00 a.m. Pacific Time on January 22, 2008. The grand-prize winners will be announced on February 11.
For more information, visit http://code.google.com
Chris Stephenson
CSTA Executive Director