Science Journal graduates from Google to Arduino

Science Journal is an open source mobile app that enables students in K-12 classrooms to conduct fun, hands-on science experiments using smart devices. Since its launch in May 2016, Science Journal has gone through quite a journey, from collaborating with rock stars to supporting classrooms, through an integration with Google Drive. Now we're pleased to share that Science Journal has graduated from Google and moved over to Arduino, the makers of the popular open source Arduino microcontrollers for students, hobbyists, and professionals around the world. Arduino Science Journal is free, open sourced, and available for download today on Android and iOS. 

We're thrilled to be handing the project to a partner that has a long history of supporting open source and education. The Arduino Science Kit for middle school students was developed in 2019 in partnership with Science Journal. The Arduino Science Journal Android source code and iOS source code, are already available on GitHub along with the Science Journal Arduino firmware. We've put a lot of time and energy into making Science Journal a great app for students and science enthusiasts everywhere, and we're confident that it will continue to thrive in its new home.

Although Google's Science Journal apps are still available on the App and Play Store today, these apps will no longer be supported after December 11, 2020, at which point Google Drive Syncing will stop working and Google's versions of the apps will no longer be available for download. However, existing Science Journal experiments can be exported from Google's Science Journal apps and imported into Arduino Science Journal at any time. You can find more information about this handoff in our Help Center article.

We see this change as a win for Google, Arduino, Science Journal, and for open source overall. Since Science Journal is an app for kids and schools, we wanted to be particularly careful with this transition. By supporting Arduino in releasing their own version of Science Journal and forking our code on GitHub, we were able to effectively hand off the project without transferring any user data or Intellectual Property. We hope this approach can serve as an effective model for future projects that need to reallocate their resources but don't want to let down their users (as we like to say: focus on the user, and all else will follow).

Moving forward, all future updates will be happening through Arduino's versions of the apps. You can stay up-to-date on the Arduino Science Journal website and experiment with their new hands-on activities, and if you have any questions, you can contact them on the Arduino Science Journal Forum.

Although the Science Journal project is moving on from Google, we still think data and scientific literacy are critically important for present and future generations, now more than ever. With the ubiquity of smart devices in classrooms and at home, we think Science Journal remains the perfect solution for parents and teachers looking to provide students with hands-on learning opportunities during this time period. We hope you enjoy using Science Journal as much as we have, and we're excited to see how the project will continue to evolve moving forward.

By Maia Deutsch and the Science Journal Team

Blockly Summit 2019: Rendering, Accessibility, and More!

It has been over eight years since we started work on Blockly, an open source library for building drag-and-drop block coding apps. In that time, the team has grown from a single developer to a small team and a large community. Blockly is now a standard in the CS education space, used by Scratch, MakeCode, AppInventor, and hundreds of other developers to enable tens of millions of kids around the world to create and express themselves with code.

But Blockly isn't only used for education. The library provides everything an app developer needs to create rich block coding languages and is highly customizable and extensible. This means Blockly is also used by hobbyists and commercial companies alike for business logic, computer games, virtual reality, robotics, and just about anything else you can do with code.


The work we do on Blockly wouldn't be possible without the many folks who contribute back with code, suggestions, and support on the forums. As such, we were very excited to welcome around 30 members of the Blockly open source community to our second annual Blockly User Summit and to be able to make all of the talks available online!

The summit spanned two days in October and included 16 talks, over half of which were given by external contributors, and a Q&A with the Blockly team. The talks covered everything from Blockly's brand new rendering framework and building custom fields to explorations in performance and debugging block code. Check out the full playlist.

We also held a hackathon on the second day of the summit, with quick start guides for using our new rendering and accessibility APIs. If you're new to Blockly and you'd like a good starting point, take a look at our CodeLab and if you build your own cool demo let us know on our forums.



By Erik Pasternak, Kids Coding Team

Google Code-in 2019 Contest for Teenagers

Today is the start of the 10th consecutive year of the Google Code-in (GCI) contest for teens. We anticipate this being the biggest contest yet!

The Basics

What is Google Code-in?
Our global, online contest introducing students to open source development. The contest runs for seven weeks until January 23, 2020.

Who can register?
Pre-university students ages 13-17 that have their parent or guardian’s permission to register for the contest.

How do students register and participate?
Students can register for the contest beginning today at g.co/gci. Once students have registered, and the parental consent form has been submitted and approved by Program Administrators, students can choose which “task” they want to work on first. Students choose the task they find interesting from a list of thousands of available tasks created by 29 participating open source organizations. Tasks take an average of 3-5 hours to complete. There are even beginner tasks that are a wonderful way for students to get started in the contest.

The task categories are:

• Coding
• Design
• Documentation/Training
• Outreach/Research
• Quality Assurance

Why should students participate?
Students not only have the opportunity to work on a real open source software project, thus gaining invaluable skills and experience, but they also have the opportunity to be a part of the open source community. Mentors are readily available to help answer their questions while they work through the tasks.

Google Code-in is a contest so there are prizes*! Complete one task and receive a digital certificate, three completed tasks and you’ll also get a fun Google t-shirt. Finalists earn a jacket, runners-up earn backpacks, and grand prize winners (two from each organization) will receive a trip to Google headquarters in California in 2020!

Details
Over the past nine years, more than 11,000 students from 108 countries have successfully completed over 55,000 tasks in GCI. Curious? Learn more about GCI by checking out the Contest Rules, short videos, and FAQs. Please visit our contest site and read the Getting Started Guide.

Teachers, if you are interested in getting your students involved in Google Code-in we have resources available to help you get started.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

* There are a handful of countries we are unable to ship physical goods to, as listed in the FAQs.

Google Code-in 2019 Org Applications are Open!

We are now accepting applications for open source organizations interested in participating in the tenth Google Code-in 2019. Google Code-in (GCI) has invited pre-university students ages 13-17 to learn hands-on by contributing to open source software.

Each year we have heard inspiring stories from the participating mentors about their commitment to working with young students. We only select organizations that have participated in Google Summer of Code because they have gained experience in mentorship and know how to provide a support system for these new, young contributors.

Organization applications are now open and all interested open source organizations must apply before Monday, October 28, 2019 at 17:00 UTC.

In 2018, 27 organizations were accepted—9 of which were participating in GCI for the first time! Over the last 9 years, 11,232 students from 108 countries have completed more than 40,000 tasks for participating open source projects. Tasks fall into 5 categories:

• Code: writing or refactoring.
• Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more.
• Outreach/Research: community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions.
• Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality.
• Design: graphic design or user interface design.

Once an organization is selected for Google Code-in 2019 they will define these tasks and recruit mentors from their communities who are interested in providing online support for students during the seven week contest.

You can find a timeline, FAQ and other information about Google Code-in on our website. If you’re an educator interested in sharing Google Code-in with your students, please see the resources here.

By Radha Jhatakia, Google Open Source

Accepting student applications for Google Summer of Code 2019

We are now accepting applications from university students who want to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Want to hone your software development skills while doing good for the open source community?

This year we are celebrating 15 years of introducing university students from around the world to open source software communities and our passionate community of mentors. For 3three months students code from the comfort of their homes and receive stipends based on thefor successful completion of their project milestones.

Past participants say the real-world experience that GSoC provides sharpened their technical skills, boosted their confidence, expanded their professional network and enhanced their resume.

Interested students can submit proposals on the program site between now and Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.

While many students began preparing in late February when we announced the 200+ participating open source organizations, it’s not too late for you to start! The first step is to browse the list of organizations and look for project ideas that appeal to you. Next, reach out to the organization to introduce yourself and determine if your skills and interests are a good fit. Since spots are limited, we recommend writing a strong proposal and submitting a draft early so you can get feedback from the organization and increase the odds of being selected.

You can learn more about how to prepare by watching the video below and checking out the Student Guide and Advice for Students.

You can find more information on our website, including a full timeline of important dates. We also highly recommend reviewing the FAQ and Program Rules.

Remember to submit your proposals early as you only have until Tuesday, April 9 at 18:00 UTC. Good luck to all who apply!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

arXiv LaTeX cleaner: safer and easier open source research papers

Open source is usually associated with code behind utilities and applications, though you can find it in many other places: such as the LaTeX source code that describes the PDFs of scientific papers.

As an example, the following source code:

Generates this PDF when compiled using pdflatex:

You can see a huge repository of such open source code at arXiv.org, an open access repository of scientific papers currently containing about 1.5 million entries (140,616 uploads in 2018). One can not only download all papers in PDF format, but also obtain the source code to regenerate them and freely reuse any of their parts.

Open sourcing LaTeX code, however, comes with its risks and challenges. We’ve built and released the code of arXiv LaTeX cleaner to remedy some of these.

Scrubbing the Code

The main risk one faces when sharing LaTeX code with the world is accidentally releasing private information, primarily through commented code left over in the file itself.

While authors put a lot of effort into polishing the final PDF, the code isn’t usually cleaned up and is left with many pieces of text that don’t actually appear in the PDF. Things like, “I do not see why the following statement should be correct,” or “Look, I’m citing you!,” make it into arXiv for everyone to see. This happens so often there’s even a Twitter bot that finds and publishes them!

Cleaning up this commented out code manually is laborious, so arXiv LaTeX cleaner automatically removes it for you.

Private information can also be found in the many auxiliary files that LaTeX generates when the code is compiled. Some of them are needed in arXiv (e.g., .bbl files), some of them are not: arXiv LaTeX cleaner will delete the unneeded ones and keep the rest automatically.

Cleaning and Autoscaling Images

Challenges also come our way when preparing the code to submit to arXiv: one needs to upload a ZIP file smaller than 10 MBytes. With high resolution pictures and figures, it’s easy to go beyond the limit.

Manually resizing images and deleting images that aren’t actually in the final version is time consuming and cumbersome, so arXiv LaTeX cleaner does that automatically, too. If there’s a very intricate figure you’d like to keep in high resolution, you can specify a list of images and their expected resolution.

We hope that, by making open sourcing research papers faster and safer, arXiv LaTeX cleaner will help even more researchers embrace open access and make their work freely available.

arXiv LaTeX cleaner itself is open source, so you can adapt it to your needs. If you think your adaptation would be useful for others, we’d love your contributions, too.

By Jordi Pont-Tuset, Machine Perception team

Seeking open source projects for Google Summer of Code 2019

Do you lead or represent a free or open source software organization? Are you seeking new contributors? (Who isn’t?) Do you enjoy the challenge and reward of mentoring new developers? Apply to be a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2019!

We are searching for open source projects and organizations to participate in the 15th annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a global program that draws university student developers from around the world to contribute to open source. Each student spends three months working on a coding project, with the support of volunteer mentors, for participating open source organizations from late May to August.

Last year 1,264 students worked with 206 open source organizations. Organizations include individual smaller and medium sized open source projects as well as a number of umbrella organizations with many sub-projects under them (Python Software Foundation, CERN, Apache Software Foundation).

You can apply to be a mentoring organization for GSoC starting today. The deadline to apply is February 6 at 20:00 UTC. Organizations chosen for GSoC 2019 will be publicly announced on February 26.

Please visit the program site for more information on how to apply and review the detailed timeline of important deadlines. We also encourage you to check out the Mentor Guide and our short video on why open source projects choose to apply to be a part of the program.

Best of luck to all of the project applicants!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

The big reveal: Google Code-in 2018 winners and finalists

Our 9th consecutive year of Google Code-in (GCI) 2018 ended in mid-December. It was a very, very busy seven weeks for everyone – we had 3,124 students from 77 countries completing 15,323 tasks with a record 27 open source organizations!

Today, we are pleased to announce the Google Code-in 2018 Grand Prize Winners and Finalists with each organization. The 54 Grand Prize Winners from 19 countries completed an impressive 1,668 tasks between them while also helping other students during the contest.

Each of the Grand Prize Winners are invited to a four day trip to Google’s main campus and San Francisco offices in Northern California where they’ll meet Google engineers, meet one of the mentors they worked with during the contest, and enjoy some fun in California with the other winners. We look forward to seeing everyone later this year!

Country	# of Winners		Country	# of Winners
Cameroon	1		Romania	1
Canada	1		Russian Federation	1
Czech Republic	1		Singapore	1
Georgia	1		South Africa	1
India	18		Spain	2
Indonesia	1		Sri Lanka	1
Macedonia	1		Ukraine	2
Netherlands	1		United Kingdom	6
Philippines	1		United States	9
Poland	4

Finalists

And a big congratulations to our 108 Finalists from 26 countries who completed over 2,350 tasks during the contest. The Finalists will all receive a special hoodie to commemorate their achievements in the contest. This year we had 1 student named as a finalist with 2 different organizations!

A breakdown of the countries represented by our finalists can be found below. 

Country	# of Finalists		Country	# of Finalists
Canada	6		Philippines	1
China	2		Poland	15
Czech Republic	1		Russian Federation	2
Germany	1		Serbia	1
India	48		Singapore	2
Indonesia	2		South Korea	1
Israel	1		Spain	1
Kazakhstan	1		Sri Lanka	2
Luxembourg	1		Taiwan	1
Mauritius	2		Thailand	1
Mexico	1		United Kingdom	3
Nepal	1		United States	8
Pakistan	2		Uruguay	1

Mentors

This year we had 790 mentors dedicate their time and invaluable expertise to helping thousands of teenage students learn about open source by welcoming them into their communities. These mentors are the heart of GCI and the reason the contest continues to thrive. Mentors spend hundreds of hours answering questions, reviewing submitted tasks, and teaching students the basics and, in many cases, more advanced aspects of contributing to open source. GCI would not be possible without their enthusiasm and commitment.

We will post more statistics and fun stories that came from GCI 2018 here on the Google Open Source Blog over the next few months, so please stay tuned.

Congratulations to our Grand Prize Winners, Finalists, and all of the students who spent the last couple of months learning about, and contributing to, open source. We hope they will continue their journey in open source!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Wrapping up Google Code-in 2018

We are excited to announce the conclusion of the 9th annual Google Code-in (GCI), our global online contest introducing teenagers to the world of open source development. Over the years the contest has not only grown bigger, but also helped find and support talented young people around the world.

Here are some initial statistics about this year’s program:

• Total number of students completing tasks: 3,123*
• Total number of countries represented by students: 77
• Percentage of girls among students: 17.9% 

Below you can see the total number of tasks completed by students year over year:

*These numbers will increase as mentors finish reviewing the final work submitted by students this morning.

Mentors from each of the 27 open source organizations are now busy reviewing the last  work submitted by participants. We look forward to sharing more statistics about the program, including countries and schools with the most student participants, in an upcoming blog post.

The mentors for each organization will spend the next couple of weeks selecting four Finalists (who will receive a hoodie too!) and their two Grand Prize Winners. Grand Prize Winners will be flown to Northern California to visit Google’s headquarters, enjoy a day of adventure in San Francisco, meet their mentors and hear talks from Google engineers.

Hearty congratulations to all the student participants for challenging themselves and making contributions to open source in the process!

Further, we’d like to thank the mentors and the organization administrators for GCI 2018. They are the heart of this program, volunteering countless hours creating tasks, reviewing student work, and helping bring students into the world of open source. Mentors teach young students about the many facets of open source development, from community standards and communicating across time zones to version control and testing. We couldn’t run this program without you! Thank you!

Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing the Grand Prize Winners and Finalists on January 7, 2019!

By Saranya Sampat, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code: 15 years strong!

Google Open Source is proud to announce Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019 – the 15th year of the program! We look forward to introducing the 15th batch of student developers to the world of open source and matching them with open source projects.

Over the last 14 years GSoC has provided over 14,000 university students from 109 countries with an opportunity to hone their skills by contributing to open source projects during their summer break. Participants gain invaluable experience working directly with mentors on open source projects, and earn a stipend upon successful completion of their project.

We’re excited to keep the tradition going! Applications for interested open source project organizations open on January 15, 2019, and student applications open March 25.

Are you an open source project interested in learning more? Visit the program site and read the mentor guide to learn more about what it means to be a mentor organization and how to prepare your community and your application. We welcome all types of organizations – large and small – and are eager to involve first time projects. Each year, about 20% of the organizations we accept are completely new to GSoC.

Are you a university student keen on learning about how to prepare for the 2019 GSoC program? It’s never too early to start thinking about your proposal or about what type of open source organization you may want to work with. You should read the student guide for important tips on preparing your proposal and what to consider if you wish to apply for the program in March. You can also get inspired by checking out the 200+ organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2018 as well as the projects that students worked on.

We encourage you to explore other resources and you can learn more on the program website.

By Stephanie Taylor, GSoC Program Lead

Google Code-in 2018 contest for teenagers begins today

Today marks the start of the 9th consecutive year of Google Code-in (GCI). This is the biggest and best contest ever and we hope you’ll join us for the fun!

What is Google Code-in?

Our global, online contest introducing students to open source development. The contest runs for 7 weeks until December 12, 2018.

Who can register?

Pre-university students ages 13-17 that have their parent or guardian’s permission to register for the contest.

How do students register and participate?

Students can register for the contest beginning today at g.co/gci. Once students have registered and the parental consent form has been submitted and approved by Program Administrators students can choose which contest “task” they want to work on first. Students choose the task they find interesting from a list of thousands of available tasks created by 27 participating open source organizations. Tasks take an average of 3-5 hours to complete. There are even beginner tasks that are a wonderful way for students to get started in the contest.

The task categories are:

• Coding
• Design
• Documentation/Training
• Outreach/Research
• Quality Assurance

Why should students participate?

Students not only have the opportunity to work on a real open source software project, thus gaining invaluable skills and experience, but they also have the opportunity to be a part of the open source community. Mentors are readily available to help answer their questions while they work through the tasks.

Google Code-in is a contest so there are prizes! Complete one task and receive a digital certificate, three completed tasks and you’ll also get a fun Google t-shirt. Finalists earn the coveted hoodie. Grand Prize winners (2 from each organization) will receive a trip to Google headquarters in California!

Details

Over the last 8 years, more than 8,100 students from 107 countries have successfully completed over 40,000 tasks in GCI. Curious? Learn more about GCI by checking out the Contest Rules and FAQs. And please visit our contest site and read the Getting Started Guide.

Teachers, if you are interested in getting your students involved in Google Code-in we have resources available to help you get started.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

These 27 organizations will mentor students in Google Code-in 2018

We’re excited to welcome 27 open source organizations to mentor students as part of Google Code-in 2018. The contest, now in its ninth year, offers 13-17 year old pre-university students from around the world an opportunity to learn and practice their skills while contributing to open source projects–all online!

Google Code-in starts for students on October 23rd. Students are encouraged to learn about the participating organizations ahead of time and can get started by clicking on the links below:

• AOSSIE: Australian umbrella organization for open source projects.
• Apertium: rule-based machine translation platform.
• Catrobat: visual programming for creating mobile games and animations.
• CCExtractor: open source tools for subtitle generation.
• CloudCV: building platforms for reproducible AI research.
• coala: a unified interface for linting and fixing code, regardless of the programming languages used.
• Copyleft Games Group: develops tools, libraries, and game engines.
• Digital Impact Alliance: collaborative space for multiple open source projects serving the international development and humanitarian response sectors.
• Drupal: content management platform.
• Fedora Project: a free and friendly Linux-based operating system.
• FOSSASIA: developing communities across all ages and borders to form a better future with Open Technologies and ICT.
• Haiku: operating system specifically targeting personal computing.
• JBoss Community: a community of projects around JBoss Middleware.
• KDE Community: produces FOSS by artists, designers, programmers, translators, writers and other contributors.
• Liquid Galaxy: an interactive, panoramic and immersive visualization tool.
• MetaBrainz: builds community maintained databases.
• MovingBlocks: a Minecraft-inspired open source game.
• OpenMRS: open source medical records system for the world.
• OpenWISP: a network management system aimed at low cost networks.
• OSGeo: building open source geospatial tools.
• PostgreSQL: relational database system.
• Public Lab: open software to help communities measure and analyze pollution.
• RTEMS Project: operating system used in satellites, particle accelerators, robots, racing motorcycles, building controls, medical devices.
• Sugar Labs: learning platform and activities for elementary education.
• SCoRe: research lab seeking sustainable solutions for problems faced by developing countries.
• The ns-3 Network Simulator Project: packet-level network simulator for research and education.
• Wikimedia: non-profit foundation dedicated to bringing free content to the world, operating Wikipedia.

These 27 organizations are hard at work creating thousands of tasks for students to work on, including code, documentation, design, quality assurance, outreach, research and training tasks. The contest starts for students on Tuesday, October 23rd at 9:00am Pacific Time.

You can learn more about Google Code-in on the contest site where you’ll find Frequently Asked Questions, Important Dates and flyers and other helpful information including the Getting Started Guide.

Want to talk with other students, mentors, and organization administrations about the contest? Check out our discussion mailing list. We can’t wait to get started!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Code-in 2018 is looking for great open source organizations to apply

We are accepting applications for open source organizations interested in participating in Google Code-in 2018. Google Code-in (GCI) invites pre-university students ages 13-17 to learn by contributing to open source software.

Working with young students is a special responsibility and each year we hear inspiring stories from mentors who participate. To ensure these new, young contributors have a solid support system, we only select organizations that have gained experience in mentoring students by previously taking part in Google Summer of Code.

Organization applications are now open and all interested open source organizations must apply before Monday, September 17 at 16:00 UTC.

In 2017, 25 organizations were accepted – 9 of which were participating in GCI for the first time! Over the last 8 years, 8,108 students from 107 countries have completed more than 40,000 tasks for participating open source projects. Tasks fall into 5 categories:

• Code: writing or refactoring.
• Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more.
• Outreach/Research: community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions.
• Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality.
• Design: graphic design or user interface design.

Once an organization is selected for Google Code-in 2018 they will define these tasks and recruit mentors from their communities who are interested in providing online support for students during the seven week contest.

You can find a timeline, FAQ and other information about Google Code-in on our website. If you’re an educator interested in sharing Google Code-in with your students, you can find resources here.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Announcing Google Code-in 2018: nine is just fine!

We are excited to announce the 9th consecutive year of the Google Code-in (GCI) contest! Students ages 13 through 17 from around the world can learn about open source development by working on real open source projects, with mentorship from active developers. GCI begins on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 and runs for seven weeks, ending Wednesday, December 12, 2018.

Google Code-in is unique because, not only do the students choose what they want to work on from the 2,500+ tasks created by open source organizations, but they have mentors available to help answer their questions as they work on each of their tasks.

Getting started in open source software can be a daunting task for a developer of any age. What organization should I work with? How do I get started? Does the organization want my help? Am I too inexperienced?

The beauty of GCI is that participating open source organizations realize teens are often first time contributors, so the volunteer mentors come prepared with the patience and the experience to help these newcomers become part of the open source community.

Open source communities thrive when there is a steady flow of new contributors who bring new perspectives, ideas and enthusiasm. Over the last 8 years, GCI open source organizations have helped 8,108 students from 107 countries make meaningful contributions. Many of these students are still participating in open source communities years later. Dozens have gone on to become Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students and even mentor other students.

The tasks that contest participants will complete vary in skill set and level, including beginner tasks any student can take on, such as “setup your development environment.” With tasks in five different categories, there’s something to fit almost any student’s skills:

• Code: writing or refactoring
• Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
• Outreach/Research: community management, marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
• Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Design: graphic design or user interface design

Open source organizations can apply to participate as mentoring organizations for in Google Code-in starting on Thursday, September 6, 2018. Google Code-in starts for students October 23rd!

Visit the contest site g.co/gci to learn more about the contest and find flyers, slide decks, timelines, and more.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

That’s a wrap for Google Summer of Code 2018

We are pleased to announce that 1,072 students from 59 countries have successfully completed the 2018 Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Congratulations to all of our students and mentors who made this our biggest and best Google Summer of Code yet.

Over the past 12 weeks, GSoC students have worked diligently with 212 open source organizations and over 2,100 mentors from all around the world, learning to work with distributed teams and developing complex pieces of code. Student projects are now public – take a closer look at their work.

Open source communities need new ideas to keep projects thriving and evolving; GSoC students bring fresh perspectives while helping organizations enhance, extend, and refine their codebases. This is not the end of the road for GSoC students! Many will go on to become mentors in future years and many more will become long-term committers.

And finally, a big thank you to the mentors and organization administrators who make GSoC possible. Their dedication to welcoming new student contributors into their communities is awesome and inspiring. Thank you all!

By Mary Radomile, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2018 statistics part 2

Now that Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2018 is underway and students are wrapping up their first month of coding, we wanted to bring you some more statistics on the 2018 program. Lots and lots of numbers follow:

Organizations

Students are working with 206 organizations (the most we’ve ever had!), 41 of which are participating in GSoC for the first time.

Student Registrations

25,873 students from 147 countries registered for the program, which is a 25.3% increase over the previous high for the program back in 2017. There are 9 new countries with students registering for the first time: Angola, Bahamas, Burundi, Cape Verde, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Kosovo, Maldives, and Mali.

Project Proposals

5,199 students from 101 countries submitted a total of 7,209 project proposals. 70.5% of the students submitted 1 proposal, 18.1% submitted 2 proposals, and 11.4% submitted 3 proposals (the max allowed).

Gender Breakdown

11.63% of accepted students are women. We are always working toward making our programs and open source more inclusive, and we collaborate with organizations and communities that help us improve every year.

Universities

The 1,268 students accepted into the GSoC 2018 program hailed from 613 universities, of which 216 have students participating for the first time in GSoC.

Schools with the most accepted students for GSoC 2018:

University	Country	Students
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	India	35
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	32
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	23
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	22
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	18
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur	India	16
University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	16
Indian Institute of Technology, Patna	India	14
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	India	13
Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi	India	11
Indraprastha Institute of Information and Technology, New Dehli	India	11
University of Buea	Cameroon	11
BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus	India	11

Another post with stats on our awesome GSoC mentors will be coming soon!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2018 statistics part 1

Since 2005, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been bringing new developers into the open source community every year. This year we accepted 1,264 students from 62 countries into the 2018 GSoC program to work with a record 206 open source organizations this summer.

Students are currently participating in the Community Bonding phase of the program where they become familiar with the open source projects they will be working with. They also spend time learning the codebase and the community’s best practices so they can start their 12 week coding projects on May 14th.

Each year we like to share program statistics about the GSoC program and the accepted students and mentors involved in the program. Here are a few stats:

• 88.2% of the accepted students are participating in their first GSoC
• 74.4% of the students are first time applicants

Degrees

• 76.18% of accepted students are undergraduates, 17.5% are masters students, and 6.3% are getting their PhDs.
• 73% are Computer Science majors, 4.2% are mathematics majors, 17% are other engineering majors (electrical, mechanical, aerospace, etc.)
• We have students in a variety of majors including neuroscience, linguistics, typography, and music technologies.

Countries

This year there are four students that are the first to be accepted into GSoC from their home countries of Kosovo (three students) and Senegal. A complete list of accepted students and their countries is below:

Country	Students		Country	Students		Country	Students
Argentina	5		Hungary	7		Russian Federation	35
Australia	10		India	605		Senegal	1
Austria	14		Indonesia	3		Serbia	1
Bangladesh	3		Ireland	1		Singapore	8
Belarus	3		Israel	2		Slovak Republic	2
Belgium	3		Italy	24		South Africa	1
Brazil	19		Japan	7		South Korea	2
Bulgaria	2		Kosovo	3		Spain	21
Cameroon	14		Latvia	1		Sri Lanka	41
Canada	31		Lithuania	5		Sweden	6
China	52		Malaysia	2		Switzerland	5
Croatia	3		Mauritius	1		Taiwan	3
Czech Republic	4		Mexico	4		Trinidad and Tobago	1
Denmark	1		Morocco	2		Turkey	8
Ecuador	4		Nepal	1		Uganda	1
Egypt	12		Netherlands	6		Ukraine	6
Finland	3		Nigeria	6		United Kingdom	28
France	22		Pakistan	5		United States	104
Germany	53		Poland	3		Venezuela	1
Greece	16		Portugal	10		Vietnam	4
Hong Kong	3		Romania	10

There were a record number of students submitting proposals for the program this year -- 5,199 students from 101 countries.

In our next GSoC statistics post we will delve deeper into the schools, gender breakdown, mentors, and registration numbers for the 2018 program.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Rolling out the red carpet for GSoC 2018 students!

Congratulations to our 2018 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students and a big thank you to everyone who applied! Our 206 mentoring organizations have chosen the 1,264 students that they'll be working with during the 14th Google Summer of Code. This year’s students come from 64 different countries!

The next step for participating students is the Community Bonding period which runs from April 23rd through May 15th. During this time, students will get up to speed on the culture and code base of their new community. They’ll also get acquainted with their mentor(s) and learn more about the languages or tools they will need to complete their projects. Coding begins May 15th and will continue throughout the summer until August 14th.

To the more than 3,800 students who were not chosen this year - don’t be discouraged! Many students apply at least once to GSoC before being accepted. You can improve your odds for next time by contributing to the open source project of your choice directly; organizations are always eager for new contributors! Look around GitHub and elsewhere on the internet for a project that interests you and get started.

Happy coding, everyone!

By Stephanie Taylor, GSoC Program Lead

My first open source project and Google Code-in

This is a guest post from a mentor with coala, an open source tool for linting and fixing code in many different languages, which participated in Google Code-in 2017.

About two years ago, my friend Gyan and I built a small web app which checked whether or not a given username was available on a few popular social media websites. The idea was simple: judge availability of the username on the basis of an HTTP response. Here’s a pseudo-code example:

website_url = form_website_url(website, username)
# Eg: form_website_url('github', 'manu-chroma') returns 'github.com/manu-chroma'

if website_url_response.http_code == 404:
  username available
else:
  username taken

Much to our delight, it worked! Well, almost. It had a lot of bugs but we didn’t care much at the time. It was my first Python project and the first time I open sourced my work. I always look back on it as a cool idea, proud that I made it and learned a lot in the process.

But the project had been abandoned until John from coala approached me. John suggested we use it for Google Code-in because one of coala’s tasks for the students was to create accounts on a few common coding related websites. Students could use the username availability tool to find a good single username–people like their usernames to be consistent across websites–and coala could use it to verify that the accounts were created.

I had submitted a few patches to coala in the past, so this sounded good to me! The competition clashed with my vacation plans, but I wanted to get involved, so I took the opportunity to become a mentor.

Over the course of the program, students not only used the username availability tool but they also began making major improvements. We took the cue and began adding tasks specifically about the tool. Here are just a few of the things students added:

• Regex to determine whether a given username was valid for any given website
• More websites, bringing it to a total of 13
• Tests (!)

The web app is online so you can check username availability too!

I had such a fun time working with students in Google Code-in, their enthusiasm and energy was amazing. Special thanks to students Andrew, Nalin, Joshua, and biscuitsnake for all the time and effort you put into the project. You did really useful work and I hope you learned from the experience!

I want to thank John for approaching me in the first place and suggesting we use and improve the project. He was an unstoppable force throughout the competition, helping both students and fellow mentors. John even helped me with code reviews to really refine the work students submitted, and help them improve based on the feedback.

Kudos to the Google Open Source team for organizing it so well and lowering the barriers of entry to open source for high school students around the world.

By Manvendra Singh, coala mentor

A galactic experience in Google Code-in 2017

This is a guest post from Liquid Galaxy, one of the organizations that participated in both Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in 2017.

Liquid Galaxy, an open source project that powers panoramic views spanning multiple computers and displays, has been participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) since 2011. However, we never applied to participate in Google Code-in (GCI) because we heard stories from other projects about long hours and interrupted holidays in service of mentoring eager young students.

That changed in 2017! And, while the stories are true, we have to say it’s also an amazing and worthwhile experience.

It was hard for our small project to recruit the number of mentors needed. Thankfully, our GSoC mentors stepped up, as did many former GSoC students. We even had forward thinking students who were interested in participating in GSoC 2018 volunteer to mentor! While it was challenging, our team of mentors helped us have a nearly flawless GCI experience.

The Google Open Source team only had to nudge us once, when a student’s task had been pending review for more than 36 hours. We’re pretty happy with that considering we had nearly 500 tasks completed over the 50 days of the contest.

More important than our experience, though, is the student experience. We learned a lot, seeing how they chose tasks, the attention to detail some of them put into their work, and the level of interaction between the students and the mentors. Considering these were young students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, they far exceeded our expectations.

There was one piece of advice the Google Open Source team gave us that we didn’t understand as GCI newbies: have a large number of tasks ready from day one, and leave some unpublished until the halfway point. That ended up being key, it ensured we had enough tasks for the initial flood of students and some in reserve for the second flood around the holidays. Our team of mentors worked hard from the moment we were accepted into GCI to the moment we began to create over 150 tasks in five different categories. Students seemed to think we did a good job and told us they enjoyed the variety of tasks and level of difficulty.

We’re glad we finally participated in Google Code-in and we’ll definitely be applying next time! You can learn more about the project and the students who worked with us on our blog.

By Andreu Ibáñez, Liquid Galaxy org admin