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.

I needed this so bad...

[pintpusher]

... 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 ;-)

Re:Google! Google!

[jo42]

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.

Limited choices...

[FirstTimeCaller]

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?

High school student, here

[the_kanzure]

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.