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.

Highschool coders...the musical

[monkeyboythom]

Students choose from a list of several hundred predetermined tasks that improve the open source project.

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...

@phobonetik re: door games

[spyrochaete]

Just curious, what door games did you write?

When I was in high school...

[caywen]

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.

Re:High school student, here

[bcrowell]

Interesting to hear your point of view on this. I have almost exactly the opposite impression, though. There is one Summer of Code project from 2007 that I'm familiar with; it drew my interest because it was a GUI app that was going to compete with an open-source app that I wrote. I figured that friendly competition between open-source projects was always a good thing, and was looking forward to seeing what they came up with. Well, the student wrote about 3000 lines of code, with essentially no comments, and no documentation. The end result is available in CVS, but hasn't been packaged in any convenient form for end-users, and as far as I can tell it's not really functional at this point, and there doesn't appear to be any continuing work on the project. So it seems to me that they simply bit off more than they could chew. IMO, it's probably appropriate to keep the projects small and simple, because then the end result is more likely to be useful to someone. If, for example, a high school student wants to write an MMORPG, that's great, but it's not a summer project for a single person.

You should be disappointed

[tknd]

When I went to high school, I participated in a program called ThinkQuest [thinkquest.org] 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.