The KDE community was one of the twelve mentoring organizations which took part in Google Code-in 2014, our open source coding contest for 13 to 17 year old students. Mentor and co-administrator Heena Mahour wrote in to tell us about the students’ accomplishments with KDE.
KDE is an international free software community. We’re best known for the Plasma Desktop which is the default for several Linux distributions, but we produce an entire integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, and OS X systems. We’re also an umbrella project for many standalone applications based on our technology.
The KDE community participated in Google Code-in (GCI) to inspire young contributors and offer them an opportunity to get involved with KDE and open source. We created 277 tasks for students to choose from, and 29 mentors volunteered to help the students with their work. Of the many projects that are part of KDE, the team behind the Marble virtual globe created the most tasks for us with 50. We also provided 65 different beginner tasks to help students without any experience take their first step as an open source contributor before moving on to more challenging tasks.
Tasks in GCI come in several categories. We offered 190 coding tasks, 26 for documentation and training, and 41 for quality assurance. It was a joy for us to see students working with the mentors and learning how to become part of an open source community. At the end of the contest, 240 tasks had been completed!
Like every organization taking part, we were able to select two students as Grand Prize Winners. From the students who completed the most tasks successfully, we considered the creativity, thoroughness, and quality of their work. Mikhail Ivchenko from Russia and Ilya Kowalewski from Ukraine were selected as our winners and will soon be visiting Google’s headquarters along with the other GCI winners.
We’re all grateful for the opportunity GCI gave us to work with these enthusiastic young students and get them involved with KDE. We hope to continue seeing their names in the future -- keep it up, everyone!
by Heena Mahour, KDE mentor and co-administrator
