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Google Summer of Code Extends to Highschoolers
phobonetik writes "Building on three successful years of engaging University students with over one hundred open source projects, the Google Summer of Code program is being complemented with the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, launched today.
Running initially as a pilot involving 10 open source projects, the contest is open to any student enrolled in highschool education. Students choose from a list of several hundred predetermined tasks that improve the open source project, and get paid small sums for their successful completion. At the end of the contest (4th Feb 2008), each of the ten open source projects nominate their best contributor, who wins a grand prize." I wish there would have been something like this when I was in high school... I wonder how great my BBS door games would have been if there was a chance of getting cash and trips.
Thank god. If they had their own projects to work on, I don't know if I could handle any more "technology advancements" to MySpace.
Not that I ever lurk there, you know...
ASS-U-ME
4. ELIGIBILITY: The Contest is open to individual students who are thirteen (13) years of age or older on November 27, 2007, who are currently enrolled in a pre-university, high school or secondary school program, and who have agreed to these Rules ("Participants"). You must demonstrate the consent of a parent or legal guardian in order to be eligible to receive any prizes as well as written proof of age and proof of enrollment in a pre-university, high school or secondary school program. The Contest is not open to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar (Burma), or to other individuals restricted by U.S. export controls and sanctions, and is void in any other nation, state, or province where prohibited or restricted by U.S. or local law. Employees, interns, contractors, and official office-holders of (1) Google, (2) participating Open Source Organizations, (3) the parent companies, affiliates and subsidiaries of either Google or any participating Open Source Organization, and members of their immediate families (defined as parents, children, siblings and spouse, regardless of where they reside, and/or those living in the same household of each) are ineligible to participate in the Contest. You must have access to the Internet and either have or sign up for a free Google Account in order to enter.
Just curious, what door games did you write?
I call first turns on BRE, L.O.R.D., and Swords of Chaos, Usurper, etc..
Oblig Sov quip.
In Soviet Russia, The BBSs Call YOU!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
... when I was in highschool. I ended up putting off my CS education until now (20 years later) because after I'd maxed out the available options in highschool (and they were really good too...) I couldn't bear *repeating* it all in college and ended up dropping out. I'm sure I'm not alone in this sentiment. Something like this would probably have helped catapult me past that point and into a real career in CS... where I've belonged this whole time.
;-)
Granted there were opportunities even then (class of '88 here). My first two jobs were computer oriented. One was teaching a introductory programming class at the local library and the other was writing some code for the school district (got $600 for that!!). But even so, the opportunities were few and far between. The result is that I'm now fully qualified to operate the bar at the engineering/cs dept mixers
man, I feel like mold.
It's only for those who can read, anyway.
First paragraph:
The Google Summer of Code program for 2007 ran through August 31, 2007. This year, the program brought together 900 students and nearly 1500 mentors across 90 countries to contribute to over 130 different open source software projects. You can check out a KML file (requires Google Earth) showcasing this year's successful participants (and their supporting mentors from various Open Source organizations).
And as others have pointed out, the eligibility clause clearly states that fariners are allowed.
Its winter here in the northern hemisphere. In less than a montht it will be the shortest day.
So is this the southern hemisphere version, or are they predicting summer will have already shifted around to February due to global warming?
Google wins again--they are so danged smart. They're not only getting a bunch of highschoolers into coding but they're orienting them to like Google. As if that were not already a done deal.
I can finally use my 16-year-old LAMP skills on a Google project. I think I've gone to heaven.
Basically, unless you live in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Burma, et al, you can compete.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I might have made more money $_$. This seems like a good way for high schoolers to make some money while doing something other than just flipping burgers or working at a convenience store. They might even develop some skills and would help on a college resume.
.... So they can get to their next batch of potential employees before Ballmer does.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
What? And lose my amateur status?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Although I dabbled in BBS's, and a little BASIC code in high school I really wouldn't have wanted to waste my summer coding. High Schoolers should be trying to get laid.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Someone please write a C++ YAML parser/emitter library and document it. It's a painful omission.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well, except for a few countries (Cuba, etc), and the reason for that is I believe Google is sanctioned against including those due to US law? (Being one of the entities involved, but from New Zealand, I am not certain on US law restrictions)
from experience...
Whee, money!
Except the kids are getting paid. And they don't have to work if they don't want to. I don't think there are any child labor issues here. It's just like asking a kid if they want to mow your lawn for five bucks an hour. And I would hope that google takes advantage of open source, I would hope that lots of people take advantage of open source. That's why it's there, isn't it? Maybe Google bashing is the new in thing, but I really don't see why you have a problem with this whole thing.
It's a relatively new mental disease called "Google On The Brain".
The main symptom is believing that everything and/or anything Google does is Good.
If you say, or even imply, that Google is bad, evil or just over-rated, you get dumped on, trashed and modded down.
If you run around proclaiming "Google is Great!", then the gaggle of brainwashed fanboys accept you as one of their own into the Google religion.
Personally I wish that Google, like Microsoft, and other large monopolies would just dry up and go away.
Well it was CmdrTaco who mentioned building stuff during High School, but come to think of it, had Google extended the newly launched High School contest even further, to grade/elementary/primary school I could have entered, but that would have needed to have been launched before Google got big :)
Back in my day I wrote a large number of QuickBasic (compiled as soon as they got to a certain size) and Borland C programs; which would cover the spectrum of multiplayer addons to games like Doom (and later Quake), all manner of small utilities, and some nostelgic Screen 13 (VGA 320x200x256 colour) games which used assembly on the tighter loops. I was sad to say my real only access to a LAN at that time was our school, fitted with low-end 386s, meaning I never really finished my IPX networking code because it was infuriatingly slow in comparison to my trusty 486DX2/66 at the time.
Sadly somewhere all that sourcecode was lost, although I'm some of may lurk around old Geocities homepages etc :P
But never mind, I still get to benefit from the program because I went off to co-found the SilverStripe web platform/CMS project, one of the open source projects involved in this high school contest... ;)
Yeah, tasks are very transparent and obvious before you commit to anything. (Examples for the SilverStripe project) and you're more likely to get useful opportunities out of putting "Worked on some cool tasks for an open source project in a Google contest for two weekends" than a year's worth of cleaning your Dad's car, babysitting, working at the cinema candy booth, starbucks etc.
Please. Informative? If you've ever participated in (or read the fine print for) a US-based contest or the like you'll know that this isn't exactly new. Don't make it sound like "We've always been at war with Eurasia". Google is a US-based company running a contest, and is therefore subject to US Law, as you said. This isn't racism on anyone's part so lets not try to sensationalize it that way.
Bill
I'd love to get my son or daughter interested in this. But given the limited list of options I don't really see this happening. Heck, four of the ten options are content management systems(!). Is this really going to excite young high school kids? Where's the music related projects? The social networking projects?
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
I'm not sure who loses out here. The OSS projects that get free help? The kids that get paid? Google, who gets kids interested in programming so that they have more potential CS grads in a few years? The people using the software that has more features or fewer bugs now?
Most kids end up doing menial tasks for small pay (paper route, baby-sitting, mowing lawns, shoveling driveways, etc.). Very few get anything like recognition for working on a large software project.
True, but there were other opportunities back then that aren't available now. I sold a couple of Apple II programs (and the articles describing them) to Nibble, one of which was published. Magazines like that don't even exist anymore.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
No, Iranians aren't allowed because U.S. law forbids commerce with residents of that country. Google doesn't want its employees going to jail or getting fined for breaking the law.
I am somewhat disappointed about the available tasks. They have tasks up like: "Remove old icons from gnome-desktop" and "Design logo" over at Apache. Are you taking young programmers seriously? I know, I know, these tasks must be done, but how's this supposed to attract the younger, yet still just as serious, programmers? There are many young guys out there that are making MMORPGs, networking libraries, improving obscure microprocessor architectures, and tons of other fun stuff. Some of us (ahem) have spent many hours behind the debugger working out kinks in algorithms, in games, or logged hours late into the night just for the hell of it. I was really hoping that this would be an opportunity to encourage serious open source development from the younger programmers out there, but really it looks more practical to join some of the open source mailing lists and going rogue. Google could have just named these guys with their label and make the whole (true) experience more than worthwhile, rather than dishing out these insults. But it's a start, I am eager to see how this plays out.
When I was in high school, we had to write a thousand lines of code to open a window with a button. Now, with 30 lines of code, high schoolers can render an instant search on petabytes of data in 3D on a cell phone. Pretty amazing progress.
So Google should go out of their way to violate the laws of the land in which they reside?
Google's a business. If you have issue with the embargoes, take it up with the government that passes the laws they're subject to.
When I went to high school, I participated in a program called ThinkQuest in 1999 and 2000. At the time it was run by an organization called advanced.org. Since then, Oracle has continued the program and it has changed for the worse. But back then, this program is probably a good portion of the reason behind my educational successes, my increased knowledge base, and some really good lessons learned that I would have never had otherwise.
ThinkQuest in those years was a pretty amazing program. You worked in teams of up to three students and international collaboration was required. In addition you could have two coaches which served more as mentors rather than coaches. The objective of the project was to build a educational website on nearly any topic. The website, whether it won or not, would be hosted and displayed on the web free of charge. The teams that won were awarded scholarships in sums of $5000, $10,000, and $15,000 per a student. That meant that if your team won first place, each of the students on the team was awarded $15,000 in scholarship money. There were 5 or 6 different categories and each category had a first place price. There was also a best of competition prize which had a sum of $25,000 per each student I think.
The program in a few words was awesome. There were no defined goals or constraints on what you could do other than that the website had to be for good educational purposes. Everything was totally in your control and up to you and that included content research, website development, and any innovation. Some websites had games and other flashy things. It was all acceptable.
I participated two years in a row. My team was completely international (US, Germany, Singapore) but we lost contact with the Singapore guy shortly after the formation of the team. In short, we failed with just two of us putting in effort and it was our first stab at the competition. But we learned a lot and I gained at least one valuable team member. The second year we added a Hong Kong team member and dumped the other guy for obvious reasons. We revamped the content and added more things that we hoped we would accomplish to make the site more interactive and we went to the finals to meet each other in person for the first time.
Looking back I am glad I took the opportunity for tons of reasons and I wish more students had the same opportunity I did. You got to meet different international individuals and overcome something seemingly impossible and challenging. But you didn't care, you were a carefree high school student. Today, people doing the same thing would be considered entrepreneurs and it is much scarier because your paycheck and credibility is on the line. Just like we failed the first time we learned what not to do (we made sure we recruited someone with previous competition experience) but many people don't have that experience or are too afraid to take the risks.
In addition after winning the competition many big successes shortly came after. It was probably one of the major reasons why I was accepted to universities and why I was offered a technical job in high school. It also stimulated me to accelerate my knowledge and learning abilities because I had no choice but to learn new things like web development in order to compete. Had I not had that experience I probably would have suffered just like everyone else in college because I would have wasted all my time in high school doing stupid things like watching tv or playing games.
So you're right. You should be disappointed. This is actually a poorly designed competition for your benefit.
Don't know that you're not allowed or anything or I 'spect it'd be hard to post on a US based site, wouldn't it? And yah- I must be part of the 5 % that knew about the Shah and the coup because one of my early-teen friends was from over there and she told me a lot about it. Um, not pretty for sure, but surely not the most hidden thing in the world. In your world mileage may vary but here it's old news. Iran needs nukes (bombs) like the rest of the planetary ruling class needs hemhroids.POWER electrical they need just like we all do- and I expect they could get quite seriously good at building all the solar shit if they wanted to...but ya have to want to first. That'll take quite a while as oil is quite profitable right now. I don't care if you're an Iranian or an alien- all I want to know is are you a PERSON- subject to feelings, love, obligations and care. if you are, you're welcome to write me with new ideas. Later, Lisa
Oops..was I supposed to push that button?