Google's Code-in contest for students begins this November

In an effort to give a boost to open source software development, Google has announced its popular Code-In contest for pre-university students. Students in the age group of 13-17 years can participate in the contest, which begins from November 26 and will continue till mid-January next year. Twenty grand prize winners of the contest will make a trip to Google’s campus in Mountain View and meet the company’s employees. Each winner will be allowed to take one of their parents or legal guardians along with them for the trip.

According to the blog post from Google, students will be able to work with 10 open source companies on a variety of tasks. All of these have successfully served as mentoring organisations working with university students in Google’s Summer of Code programme.

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

Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code.

Documentation/training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more.

Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions.

Quality assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring that code is of high quality.

User interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction.