Google Code In 2012

[Aaron Meurer]

Hi everyone.

Google has announced again that they are running Google Code In, and
has invited mentoring organizations to participate. For those of you
who did not help out last year, Google Code In is a contest run by
Google in the (northern hemisphere) winter months for 13-17 year-olds.
Several organizations create tasks suitable for such an audience, and
the mid- to high-school students compete to see who can complete the
most tasks. Unlike GSoC, there is no pairing of mentors to students;
rather, there is a group of mentors for each org who can accept
students' work, and assist them.

Last year, we participated, and it was pretty successful. Aside from
tons of bug and documentation fixes in the main SymPy code base, the
contest lead to many improvements to SymPy Live, including the current
design, the mobile version, tab completion, and the history.

So the question is, do we want to apply to participate again this
year? The basic problem is one of manpower. Participating requires a
lot of effort on the part of the mentors. Unlike GSoC, the students
require a lot more hand holding. So we should only do it if enough
people are willing to help out. The contest runs from November 26 to
January 14. There is more information at
http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012,
particularly the "Rules" and "FAQ" link. See also
http://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIMentorInformation2012
for some information on what we will have to do with regard to
creating tasks.

For those who helped out last year, you'll be glad to hear that they
made some important changes to the rules of the contest this year. In
particular, quoting from Stephanie Taylor's email to the mentor list:

- The point system has been overhauled and now every task is worth one
point. The 5 students with the highest number of completed tasks with
your org will be the pool from which you, the mentoring org, will
choose your 2 Grand Prize winners based on the overall complete body
of work of those 5 students.

- There will be 10 Mentoring Orgs for a total of 20 Grand Prize
Winners (compared to 10 last year).

- Translation tasks will no longer be a part of the Google Code-in
contest, either as its own category or as a part of documentation
efforts.

- If students want to go for the Grand Prize they will work
predominantly with one org and will hopefully become involved with the
community of that org and will stay long after the GCI contest is
over.

- Students will not earn cash prizes for their work. They will earn
certificates and t-shirts and then they can go for the grand prize if
they wish.

- The contest was shortened by a week at the beginning of the contest
period so it will now start after the Thanksgiving holidays in the
USA.

So I for one am really liking these overhauled rules. I think that
this should solve most, if not all, of the issues that we had with the
program last year.

I think the only issue for us then with regards to applying or not is,
as I said, if we have enough manpower to handle mentoring the
students. If you think you can help for at least some time period
between November 26 to January 14, please let me know here, so I can
get a feel for if we should apply or not. The requirements for being
a mentor are minimal. If you have contributed to SymPy before, and
(obviously) if you don't plan to participate in GCI as a student, then
you are probably OK to help out. We basically just need people to
review the massive amount code that comes in in a timely manner.

Aaron Meurer

[Aaron Meurer]

Oh, and one point I forgot to mention. The application period for
organizations opens October 22. So we should decide by then if we
want to apply. For those going to the mentor summit, that is right
after the summit, so I recommend you go to the session on GCI at the
summit.

Aaron Meurer

[Sergiu Ivanov]

Hello,

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Aaron Meurer <asme...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Google has announced again that they are running Google Code In, and
> has invited mentoring organizations to participate.

[...]

> I think the only issue for us then with regards to applying or not is,
> as I said, if we have enough manpower to handle mentoring the
> students. If you think you can help for at least some time period
> between November 26 to January 14, please let me know here, so I can
> get a feel for if we should apply or not. The requirements for being
> a mentor are minimal. If you have contributed to SymPy before, and
> (obviously) if you don't plan to participate in GCI as a student, then
> you are probably OK to help out. We basically just need people to
> review the massive amount code that comes in in a timely manner.

I will most probably be able to contribute answering questions and
reviewing code, so count me in. I can't tell right away how many
hours per day I will be able to put into this, but I think it's not
going to be much less than an hour.

Google Code In sounds very exciting :-) I'm looking forward to it.
(I'm not going to participate as a student, obviously.)

Sergiu

[Sean Vig]

Aaron Meurer

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group.
To post to this group, send email to sy...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sympy+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.

I can contribute whatever time I can find. It's unlikely any high school students would be able to do much in the physics module, which is really my strong suit, but I can try to help review whatever. I'll likely be pretty busy until winter break, but even with school, several hours a week would not be unreasonable.

Sean

[Ondřej Čertík]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Aaron Meurer <asme...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone.
>
> Google has announced again that they are running Google Code In, and
> has invited mentoring organizations to participate. For those of you
> who did not help out last year, Google Code In is a contest run by
> Google in the (northern hemisphere) winter months for 13-17 year-olds.
> Several organizations create tasks suitable for such an audience, and
> the mid- to high-school students compete to see who can complete the
> most tasks. Unlike GSoC, there is no pairing of mentors to students;
> rather, there is a group of mentors for each org who can accept
> students' work, and assist them.
>
> Last year, we participated, and it was pretty successful. Aside from
> tons of bug and documentation fixes in the main SymPy code base, the
> contest lead to many improvements to SymPy Live, including the current
> design, the mobile version, tab completion, and the history.

I will be able to help later on, in December for a while. I am finishing
my PhD and defending on November 8, so I won't have any time before
then.

If you think that we can pull it off, then we should do it, I think it
really helped
SymPy, both in terms of publicity, code as well as new contributors. I think
we just need enough mentors to help out --- the tasks are really small,
but there are a lot of them.

Ondrej

[Aaron Meurer]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 11:39 PM, Ondřej Čertík <ondrej...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Aaron Meurer <asme...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone.
>>
>> Google has announced again that they are running Google Code In, and
>> has invited mentoring organizations to participate. For those of you
>> who did not help out last year, Google Code In is a contest run by
>> Google in the (northern hemisphere) winter months for 13-17 year-olds.
>> Several organizations create tasks suitable for such an audience, and
>> the mid- to high-school students compete to see who can complete the
>> most tasks. Unlike GSoC, there is no pairing of mentors to students;
>> rather, there is a group of mentors for each org who can accept
>> students' work, and assist them.
>>
>> Last year, we participated, and it was pretty successful. Aside from
>> tons of bug and documentation fixes in the main SymPy code base, the
>> contest lead to many improvements to SymPy Live, including the current
>> design, the mobile version, tab completion, and the history.
>
> I will be able to help later on, in December for a while. I am finishing
> my PhD and defending on November 8, so I won't have any time before
> then.

Good luck!

>
> If you think that we can pull it off, then we should do it, I think it
> really helped
> SymPy, both in terms of publicity, code as well as new contributors. I think
> we just need enough mentors to help out --- the tasks are really small,
> but there are a lot of them.

I think so too. Based on the rule changes, I think that there will be
lower participation this year. And if anything, we can post a smaller
number of tasks if we don't have enough people. Another rule change
that I did not mention is that this year, tasks can be added at any
time (last year, they had to be added at the beginning or the middle
of the contest). So we can phase them in to match our manpower.

Aaron Meurer

>
> Ondrej

[Vishesh Kumar]

I have very little contribution to the sympy code base (just one slight improvement/bug-fix as part of my GSoC 2012 application), but I did learn a lot in the process, and would like to try helping out as a mentor. Possibly learn more about sympy myself, in the process!

Is this possible/helpful, or would I just be increasing the drag on sympy's side?

Regards

Vishesh

[Aaron Meurer]

Sure. The main work will be reviewing pull requests. This is
something that you can actually help out with outside of GCI as well.

We may also need some help in the application writing stage, and with
creating tasks for the students (I'll post more info on those here as
they come up).

Aaron Meurer

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "sympy" group.

> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sympy/-/CtyhGqXiKWcJ.

[Stefan Krastanov]

Count me in.

There is a ton of possible task concerning implementing new types of
plots and updating the wiki with examples of them. I will be able to
focus on those.

And I am wondering, how plausible is it to ask from a GCI student to
help me with finishing my WIP pull requests. Also I have some
spaghetti code implementing the MadGraph Feynman diagram generator
that I want to submit to sympy. Refactoring it can fit in GCI, right?
Anyway, all this can be discussed when we start listing the tasks.

However I should warn the admins, that I will be able to spent at most
4-5 hours a week on this. Even this may turn out an optimistic
estimate.

[Aaron Meurer]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Stefan Krastanov
<krastano...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Count me in.

Great!

>
> There is a ton of possible task concerning implementing new types of
> plots and updating the wiki with examples of them. I will be able to
> focus on those.
>
> And I am wondering, how plausible is it to ask from a GCI student to
> help me with finishing my WIP pull requests. Also I have some
> spaghetti code implementing the MadGraph Feynman diagram generator
> that I want to submit to sympy. Refactoring it can fit in GCI, right?
> Anyway, all this can be discussed when we start listing the tasks.

Sure, but good luck finding a high school student who knows what a
Feynman diagram is.

Aaron Meurer

[Ondřej Čertík]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Stefan Krastanov
<krastano...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Count me in.
>
> There is a ton of possible task concerning implementing new types of
> plots and updating the wiki with examples of them. I will be able to
> focus on those.
>
> And I am wondering, how plausible is it to ask from a GCI student to
> help me with finishing my WIP pull requests. Also I have some
> spaghetti code implementing the MadGraph Feynman diagram generator
> that I want to submit to sympy. Refactoring it can fit in GCI, right?

I would definitely be interested in having a Feynman diagram generator.

Ondrej

[Bharath M R]

Hi,

You can also count me in. I will be totally free from December 6th onwards

and can help out with the review process.

As Krastanov mentioned, there are lots of plot functions that can be implemented

and they are very easy to implement. 

Thanks, 

Bharath M R 

[Alan Bromborsky]

How about a "clean" separation between algorithmic and non-algorithmic
processes (simplification rules) and in order to not reinvent the wheel
use something like pyclips to process the rule based simplification?

[Matthew Rocklin]

I'm happy to review any tasks in the modules that I usually work in (Matrices/Sets/Stats) that don't require a huge amount of hand-holding. If you send out a reminder around task-generation time I'll try to come up with a few within these modules.

In general I suspect that people will find mentoring much easier if they work on tasks that they care about. If someone makes up a task in Matrices then chances are I'll review it (I care about matrices). If I'm asked to review a task in integration then chances are that my thesis will take precedence.

From my perspective it would also be cool if we had specialized methods mentors to handle the "I don't know how to use git" questions.

[Stefan Krastanov]

> How about a "clean" separation between algorithmic and non-algorithmic
> processes (simplification rules) and in order to not reinvent the wheel use
> something like pyclips to process the rule based simplification?

Is this a suitably simple task for GCI? Anyway, we can add it (akin to
the "research" task last year, even though there won't be such
distinction this time).

[Stefan Krastanov]

>> And I am wondering, how plausible is it to ask from a GCI student to
>> help me with finishing my WIP pull requests. Also I have some
>> spaghetti code implementing the MadGraph Feynman diagram generator
>> that I want to submit to sympy. Refactoring it can fit in GCI, right?
>> Anyway, all this can be discussed when we start listing the tasks.
>
> Sure, but good luck finding a high school student who knows what a
> Feynman diagram is.

It is PEP8 stuff and adding it to the import tree of sympy, so there
is no need to understand the theory behind it.

[Aaron Meurer]

On Sep 26, 2012, at 6:50 AM, Stefan Krastanov

This is definitely a better fit for GSoC.

By the way, another good news this year is that research and outreach
are now one category. Last year, the research tasks seemed kind of
contrived, and I don't think any of them were even completed.

Aaron Meurer

>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group.

[Vladimir Perić]

I'm up for helping. I think the rule changes, especially not getting
paid for each single task, will mean much less work for mentors (in
the sense that there will be a lot more repeat students so we won't
need to go through Git basics quite so many times).

Like last year, I think we will have a lot of luck if we focus our
tasks on a) examples and other documentation (it's easy enough, can
even be fun for the student, and is a real help to the project); and
b) things outside the competencies of the core developers (eg.
anything web related, you said it yourself that SymPy Live and Gamma
improved a lot). We can't really expect a random high school student
to dive into quantum mechanics or whatever.


--
Vladimir Perić

[Aaron Meurer]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:06 AM, Vladimir Perić <vlada...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm up for helping. I think the rule changes, especially not getting
> paid for each single task, will mean much less work for mentors (in
> the sense that there will be a lot more repeat students so we won't
> need to go through Git basics quite so many times).

Absolutely. I think it will mean far fewer students in general,
because quite a few of the students just did it for the money (and in
general, these were among the least pleasant students to work with).

Also, the rules encourage students to pick an organization and stick
with it, so hopefully we will get much more of a community out of GCI
students. We can even make it clear that a factor in our choosing the
winners from the top five contributors will be in how much/well they
interacted with the community in general.

>
> Like last year, I think we will have a lot of luck if we focus our
> tasks on a) examples and other documentation (it's easy enough, can
> even be fun for the student, and is a real help to the project); and
> b) things outside the competencies of the core developers (eg.
> anything web related, you said it yourself that SymPy Live and Gamma
> improved a lot). We can't really expect a random high school student
> to dive into quantum mechanics or whatever.

Yes. The best contributions from last year were:

- SymPy Live
- Documentation and the webpage, especially really easy documentation
stuff like just adding functions to Sphinx
- Simple bug fixes

I was impressed at how many high school students were fluent in
Javascript and CSS/web design.

We can also add tasks for:

- Cleaning up various parts of the wiki
- SymPy Bot (I tagged a bunch of issues last year, but forgot to add
them to Melange)
- SymPy Gamma

Aaron Meurer

>
>
> --
> Vladimir Perić

[Dia Ken]

Hello,

I'm planning to participate in the GCI2012 contest and i have an idea
about a task .
My idea is about the planet.sympy.org, to be more clear, the task will
be about improving the theme of the page to make it looks like other
sympy's domains(pages).

--
Greeting!
Kendhia :)

[Aaron Meurer]

That's a great idea. There are actually several tasks we could do for the planet. One is to fix the update bot to only update the page when there are actual updates. 

Note that the planet just uses the planet software. It that flexible enough to theme how you are suggesting?

Aaron Meurer

[Dia Ken]

I think it's ok because i suggest just to edit some files .

On 01/10/2012, Aaron Meurer <asme...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That's a great idea. There are actually several tasks we could do for the
> planet. One is to fix the update bot to only update the page when there are
> actual updates.
>
> Note that the planet just uses the planet software. It that flexible enough
> to theme how you are suggesting?
>
> Aaron Meurer
>
>
> On Monday, October 1, 2012, Dia Ken wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm planning to participate in the GCI2012 contest and i have an idea
>> about a task .
>> My idea is about the planet.sympy.org, to be more clear, the task will
>> be about improving the theme of the page to make it looks like other
>> sympy's domains(pages).
>>

>> On 26/09/2012, Aaron Meurer <asme...@gmail.com <javascript:;>> wrote:
>> > On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:06 AM, Vladimir Perić

>> > <vlada...@gmail.com<javascript:;>

>> >> sy...@googlegroups.com<javascript:;>
>> .

>> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

>> >> sympy+un...@googlegroups.com <javascript:;>.

>> >> For more options, visit this group at
>> >> http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
>> >>
>> >
>> > --
>> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>> > Groups
>> > "sympy" group.
>> > To post to this group, send email to

>> > sy...@googlegroups.com<javascript:;>
>> .

>> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

>> > sympy+un...@googlegroups.com <javascript:;>.

>> > For more options, visit this group at
>> > http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Greeting!
>> Kendhia :)
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
>> "sympy" group.
>> To post to this group, send email to sy...@googlegroups.com

>> <javascript:;>
>> .

>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

>> sympy+un...@googlegroups.com <javascript:;>.