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Google Code-In (and some other stuff)
3rd of November 2019
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Recently, I found out about a program run by Google for
pre-university students in high/secondary school, called Google
Code-In [0].

Luckily for me, I am elegible to participate; it happens to run
over Australia's summer school holidays. I'm planning to do it
myself, but this is more about what I think about it than what I
plan to do in it.

I really, really like the idea. Getting students coding and into
open source is great for the developer community. The students get
to learn what open source is and what it's like to work on a real
project. The organisations chosen have great mentors and can help
the students.

Another thing I like is how you don't have to be a coder to do it.
There are 5 categories of tasks to do:
- Coding
- Documents & Training
- Outreach & Research
- Quality Assurance
- Design
However, I think there is a serious problem in the tasks; the
student has to be rather competent in the language to be able to
progress in the competition. Since most of the tasks are real-world
problems and are not trying to introduce the student to coding, the
project only benefits a niche of students, as can be seen from the
statistics [1].

This brings me to my next point. Last year, Only 2,164 students
completed at least 3 tasks, which may seem like quite a large
number, but world-wide that isn't all that many. It's obviously got
a design flaw somewhere, or a lack of visibility on the internet (I
didn't seem to have it very hard to find).

It does seem to be growing, however, as last year 79% of students
were first time participants. That's a significant amount but does
make me wonder if people only do it for one year and drop off.
Statistically the figure does make a bit of sense though, as the
majority of students are 15-17.

This program seems to have a good partnership with Google Summer of
Code, as well, since the mentoring organisations come from those
for Google Summer Of Code. There seems to be a wide spread of
organisations this year, including ones I've never heard of before.
[2]

Overall, it looks like a great project, but might be slightly
poorly designed for it's intentions and target audience.

~fosslinux

[0]: https://codein.withgoogle.com/
[1]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/03/reflecting-on-google-code-in-2018.html
[2]: https://codein.withgoogle.com/organizations/