Google's junior Code-in event returns for a second year

Carol Smith, Google Code-in Program Manager, has announced that this year's Google Code-in program will begin soon. The program is open to students aged 13-17 from around the world, and offers them the opportunity to take on a variety of tasks related to open source development, including writing and refactoring code, user interface design, translation, documentation and testing. Smith said that "the purpose of the Google Code-in competition is to give students everywhere an opportunity to explore the world of open source development".

Organisations will be chosen from those who took part in this year's Google's Summer of Code program to act as mentors to the students and the students will attempt tasks for the organisations' projects. Each task has a difficulty level and an associated number of points assigned to it – the winners will be those with the highest points score accumulated when the contest ends on 10 January 2012. Ten grand prize winners will be selected and will receive a trip to Google's California Headquarters to participate in an award ceremony and speak to current Google engineers.

Last year's Code-in program saw 361 students from 48 countries take part, completing tasks for 20 organisations including GNOME, KDE, WordPress and Drupal. Mentoring organisations for this year's Code-in program will be announced on 5 November, while the program itself will commence on 21 November. More information on participation and rules can be found on the program's official web site.

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