Google Code-in

  • Google Code-in is a contest for students aged 13-18 to contribute to open source software development.

  • Students completed over 2,000 tasks across various categories like coding, documentation, and outreach.

  • The contest had global participation, with the US, Romania, and Bulgaria having the most participants.

  • 14 Grand Prize winners were selected and will be flown to Google headquarters.

  • The contest involved a variety of open source organizations, listed on the page.

Google Code-in, Google's contest to introduce pre-university students (age 13-18) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible, concluded on January 10, 2011. We had 361 students from 48 countries complete over 2,000 tasks during the 7 week contest. The tasks included:

  1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
  2. Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
  3. Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
  4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
  5. Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
  6. Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
  7. Translation: Tasks related to localization
  8. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

The top 10 countries with the highest number of participants were, in order: The United States, Romania, Bulgaria, The Russian Federation, India, Poland, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Australia.

The students did such excellent work we had 14 Grand Prize winners instead of just 10 as we had originally planned. These students will be flown to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA with their parent or legal guardian in early May to meet with Google engineers and to enjoy some fun in the California sun.

Thank you to all of the students that participated in the contest and the mentors and administrators at the open source organizations.