The contest that is designed to give teens a chance of making a useful contribution to open source software has just started - and it's not just coding. There are other tasks to choose from.

This is the third year that Google has run a challenge to bring together open source organizations and pre-university students aged 13 to 17 who may be thinking about including computer science in their future plans. It can also seen as a first step, a foot-in-the-door move,  to getting accepted as a university student for the Google Summer of Code, 

Last year, 542 students from 56 countries competed in the contest and there were 10 grand prize winners who won a trip to Google’s Mountain View California campus. This year ten open source projects have been selected as mentoring organizations and each of them will nominate 2 students among the five who score the most points as Grand Prize winners.

There are no cash awards for this contest - participants gain certificates for completing tasks and win tee-shirts for completing three or more.

The main reward of this program is the contact it establishes with mentors within open source organizations and the satisfaction of completing worthwhile tasks.

This year the task categories are as follows:

1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
3. Outreach/Research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality.
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Only one student can work on a task and the first step is to submit a "request to claim task" from the lists provided by the organizations.

This video explains the contest in detail:

Good luck to all who participate. It's a great first step for students and benefits the entire open source movement.

Related articles:

Google Code-In 2011

Google contest to get kids involved in Open Source

Google's Summer of Code 2011

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