The Google Code-In recently ended and GSoC applications are closed. Now it's time to start preparing for next year's competition. One large problem regarding the contest is that there is not much involvement within development communities, which means many potential students aren't being introduced to the world of open source. This shows that Drupal, as a community, needs to encourage the future generation of programmers to contribute to open source, which this contest does a great job of doing.
How can we find and encourage these interested students?
Slurpee and I met a couple of days ago after Google flew us out to San Francisco for the GCI Grand Prize Trip. We have discussed many possibilities of outreach, such as going through teachers and Google; however, we believe that parents may be the key to this dilemma. For example, my father is the one that introduced me to GCI and open source. Because of him I'm currently in San Francisco for the GCI Grand Prize Trip. We also know that there are many more ideas out there so please add them to this discussion.
Comments
Organizing Tasks Ideas and Outreach
Now that GSoC applications have been accepted for 2014, this is a great time to start thinking about GCI 2014 tasks. Do we see any proposals or pieces of proposals we can use as GCI tasks? I have created the "Google Code-In 2014 Task Organization Wiki" and everyone is encouraged to start adding ideas @ https://groups.drupal.org/node/420453
Starting an idea's list early will help with outreach finding additional students and thinking of new quality task ideas.
Time for GCI Outreach
Google Summer of Code is over and it is time to switch focus back into Google Code-In. Throughout the year we organized ideas and already have a head start on our task list for application. Now it is important for Drupal to utilize the power of our community to spread the word of GCI. Drupal is a large community and is popular within educational communities, it is only natural we combine resources. It is perfect timing as majority of high schools throughout the northern hemisphere start fairly soon...
Does anyone have any ideas on the topic of Drupal specific outreach for GCI? Utilizing Google's GCI flyer ( http://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/downloads/list ) is a good start. Maybe we can create a Drupal specific GCI flyer too? Nick_vh showed interest in creating this for us. Any feedback for Nick? Our goal is to help promote the contest to students and spark an interest with students in Drupal who might already be interested in web development. In addition, we're looking for find mentors to help create, review, and mentor tasks.
How do we spread the word of GCI? Everyone seems to know at least one teacher. However, every computer related teacher I've met at the high school level has never heard of GCI. Is there an easy way to contact massive amounts of high school computer programs via email? I'm tempted to reach out to my alumni high school and request a chance to promote GCI in person. Maybe each mentor this year is encouraged to reach out to their alumni high school for promotion? Maybe we can start small this year to see how a few ideas work out and improve again next year?
GCI student alumni, how did you first learn about the GCI contest? What sparked your interest in moving forward?
GCI Outreach
I first heard of the contest from my dad three years ago, but if he never said anything, I doubt I would have ever learned about it. Because of this, I think it's very important that we reach out to different teachers at different schools. Maybe we could even encourage these teachers to give extra credit for participation in the GCI as an incentive for the students to participate. It would also be great to utilize drupalladder.org as a starting point for new students as many people going into the competition will have little to no experience with open source development, which is a big step up from writing simple scripts that might be found in a high school classroom environment. (I'll work on cleaning up the massive amounts of spam before the competition).
I think that it might also be a good idea to mark a few tasks specific for beginners. The first time I entered in this competition I remember scrolling through the task lists for different organizations and being extremely intimidated by them. It turned out that many tasks just needed some familiarity with the respective organizations' codebases to be done and these beginner tasks would be a great place to start. If I remember correctly, there were over 2000 registered students for the GCI, but only ~340 completed tasks. It would be wonderful if some tasks were specifically marked so that they could be taken on by new students.