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Google Code-in Cancelled

All good things must come to an end. Google Code-in 2019 was the last GCI. We want to thank Google and all the open-source projects that participated for all the hard work put into Google Code-in. This was sent to the gci-announce mailing list: Google Code-in wrapped up 10 amazing, productive, exhilarating years in January. There have been 14,700+ teenagers from 115+ countries and over 6,000 schools that have completed an impressive 76,200+ open source tasks with 63 open source organizations over the past decade. The Google Code-in 2019 was our final Google Code-in contest. We've been looking hard at our portfolio of programs and as open source evolves, our programs need to evolve too. We've decided to focus our efforts on Google Summer of Code and programs like Season of Docs that meet projects' sustainability needs going into the next 10 years of open source. The thousands of students that have participated in GCI over the last 10 years have brought fresh, new pers
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Why You Should Participate in Google Code-in Next Year

Note Google has cancelled GCI. 😢 This post is now for historical purposes only. 🏛️ Let's start out with defining what Google Code-in, commonly known as GCI, is. Google Code-in is an open-source development contest for 13-17 year old pre-university (a.k.a. high school or secondary school) students. The goal is to encourage students to get involved in open-source software development. If you're not a programmer, don't worry! There are plenty of non-coding tasks, including writing documentation, designing logos, and many other things! Learning more about code (or other things) In Google Code-in, you often don't know exactly how to complete a task. You often have to get help. This is a good thing, because it encourages you to learn more about whatever you're doing. Even if you never finish a particular task, you can still learn from it. For example, in a logo design task that I never finished, I learned that good logos don't rely on text. Communication ski

WARNING: Watch out for fake Finalist emails

If you received a Finalist, Runner-up, or Grand Prize Winner email yesterday, please make sure it is legitimate. There have been spam/prank emails telling random students that they are Finalists, Runners-up, or Grand Prize Winners. At least one came from gci-support@sapo.pt. How to tell a legitimate email from an illegitimate one: Make sure it comes from codein-noreply@google.com, not any other address. Make sure it has Google's address and a "mandatory service announcement" paragraph at the bottom. Make sure there is a PDF certificate with your correct name attached. Make sure there is no Google Docs document listed as an attachment. At least one of the spam messages had a Google Doc listing acceptable forms of school ID attached. Also, the document attached had last year's dates. The legitimate emails contain a link to a Google Docs document, but it is not an attachment . The document in the legitimate emails contains this year's dates

My GCI Experience

Hello, I'm ScoopGracie. I heard about Google Code-in by reading the Google Open Source blog. I thought it sounded cool, so I decided to participate this year. When I looked through the orgs list, nothing really caught my attention at first. OpenMRS looked interesting, but I don't know Java. I looked for orgs that use Python, which is my favorite language. The first one I found was Apertium, so I picked that. Apertium is a free and open-source rule-based machine translation (RBMT) system. It mostly focused on minority languages, which often lack any other machine translation systems. The Apertium community on IRC is very welcoming and helpful. They always clarified anything I didn't understand, and answered any questions I had. I ended up doing nine tasks, which is a fairly typical amount for Apertium, although one of them was not done correctly, and one of them was actually supposed to be split into two. That leaves it at nine. Because I only know English, I wa