Google Code-in

This is a contest for pre-university students ages 13-17. Please be aware GCI will start about a month earlier this year than in previous years - the contest starts for students October 23rd 2018.

KDE has been accepted for the 2018 contest. Now is the time for all mentors to:

Subscribe to the KDE-Soc-Mentor list if you are not subscribed.

Ask to be invited to the GCi webapp. Any of the admins can do that. Please write directly to kde-soc-mentor and tell us what email address you want to use.

create more tasks!

Things to keep in mind:

Mentors must be invited by OA's using the mentor's preferred Google account.
Mentors may be as young as 13. A special Parental Consent form (Mentor Participant) is required and will be sent to any 13-17 year old prospective mentor when they first register with your org. OA's must be 18 years or older.
Consider having multiple "instances" for some tasks (ex: you can have 20 of the same task available for students to work on, rather than making copies of the same task over and over again. This is a good strategy for beginner tasks.)

We strongly encourage you to have a minimum of 50 unique tasks comprising at least 100 task instances available on October 23rd, the start of the contest. The more tasks you have in your queue at the start of the contest, the easier your life will be for the next 7 weeks - trust us on this.

Be sure to have tasks in all 5 categories throughout the contest.
Tasks should range in difficulty from "I'm totally new and have no programming skills" to "I'm a comfortable programmer." Most participants will do easier tasks, but you'll be surprised by how many start easy and work their way towards harder ones.
You do not need to publish all of the tasks on the first day of the contest. We encourage you to publish more tasks every few days during the first few weeks of the contest when demand is particularly high. Fresh tasks help keep students interested!
In 2017, the average number of tasks completed per org was 650.

Important Information about Creating Tasks

Only Org Admins can publish tasks so you are ultimately responsible for what tasks are available for students. Mentors can create tasks but Org Admins have to publish them (you can do bulk publishing, so don't worry).
Do not create any tasks that require students to supply personal information. For example, what country they live in, pictures of the student, hobbies, etc. This is personal information and can not be asked or required of students in any manner. If you are unsure about a task please reach out to [email protected] and we can okay it or say it's not acceptable.
Tasks should have a specific tangible output. Code, graphics, documentation, tests, test verification, etc.

It is not a "task" to require someone to make an account, sign up for a mailing list, or follow you on social media. Some of those things are overhead, some of the others are blatant marketing and don't benefit the student. We understand that sometimes this kind of trivial task is used as a beginner / hook task, but you'll need to find other things that are not trivial and don't violate privacy concerns.

No tasks asking students to write blog posts about themselves. You can ask students to write a blog post about some kind of research related to your org, etc. but not a task asking them to write about their favorite tasks or why they are participating, etc.

Contest site: https://codein.withgoogle.com/ | Announcement: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/08/announcing-google-code-in-2018.html FAQ: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/faq

The major changes for GCI 2018

Orgs will evaluate the 20 students completing the most tasks with their org when deciding on finalists and winners
Orgs will choose 6 finalists (instead of 5)
The former User Interface category is now called Design
Students will have to wait until Google reviews their Parental Consent form before they can claim their first task. This will slow things down but it is a requirement to be able to continue the program.
No tasks asking for personal information about students will be allowed (this includes tasks asking for students to introduce themselves with info like what country they are from, or photos of the students, etc.).

When we get into the contest, some information about how to detect cheating