Google announces Code-in 2011 grand prize winners

Stephanie Taylor from Google's Open Source Programs Office has announced the grand prize winners for the 2011 Google Code-in contest. Five of the ten overall winners are from India, while two are from Romania; the remaining students are from the US, UK and Canada.

Google's Code-in contest is designed to introduce pre-university students (13 to 17) from around the world to open source software development. This is done by having them complete small tasks like writing or refactoring code, and working on user interface design, translations, documentation and testing. Each of these tasks had a difficulty level rating and an associated number of points assigned to it.

During the 2011 event, more than 540 students from 56 countries participated. They completed over 3,050 tasks for 18 open source projects such as GNOME and KDE, as well as openSUSE, FreeBSD and Perl. The top ten students together finished a total of 449 tasks.

The grand prize winners will be flown to Google's Mountain View, California campus with a parent or legal guardian for four nights in June. There they will receive an award from the company and meet with engineers, as well as have "a fun day exploring San Francisco".

All of the students who participated in the contest will receive a t-shirt and a certificate for their participation. Those who successfully completed three or more of the tasks will also receive "a small monetary prize"; the specific amount was not mentioned. Further information about the 2011 contest can be found on the Google Code-in 2011 home page.

See also:

• Google Summer of Code 2012 announced, a report from The H.

(crve)