Google Code In participation for BECCA project?

[Matt Chapman]

Hi all,

Google Code In is a competition sponsored by Google to entice High School students to contribute to open-source projects.

Excepts from the GCI Mentor Information wiki:

http://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIMentorInformation2012

"When designing your tasks please try to think about the time and difficulty involved in the task regardless of what kind of task it is and do your best to make the tasks equivalent. As a metric, consider how long a task would take an experienced project member to complete. When designing the task do your best to make each task something that would take an experienced project member approximatety 2 hours to complete. This may mean breaking a coding project into smaller chunks or adding more work to a documentation effort, etc." [snip]

"The GCI program isn’t like a mini GSoC: tasks will need to be independent activities (not part of some large project as would be the case in GSoC). Also, GCI is open to all 13-17 year old students, so there isn’t a barrier to entry for them to participate in the contest. Their work might reflect this. It is perfectly acceptable to tell a student their work doesn’t meet the standards your org expects for the task. Please tell the student promptly so they can go back and try and fix their work, or "unclaim" the task and move on to another task that might be more in their skill set."


Can we find enough entry-level, 2 hour tasks that could be done by a teenager? We need to maintain a list of about 5 tasks to pick from through mid-January.

Applications are due November 5. If a few people can help clean-up our Issue Queue:

http://openbecca.org/project/issues/core

...then I will submit an application for us. I think we should try to get 10 very specific things in the next week. E.g., instead of just, "we need more Unit Tests" there should be "we need unit tests for each method in ClassX of this/sub/directory." Other simple tasks might be making (new) YouTube videos of existing tasks BECCA can do.

Note there is no proposal process for the students, like GSoC has. We simply list tasks we want done, and students take them and do them as instructed. So the more explicit, the better.


All the Best,

Matt Chapman
Ninjitsu Web Development
http://www.NinjitsuWeb.com
ph: 818-660-6465 (818-660-NINJA)
fx: 888-702-3095

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=13333058

If you want to endorse my skills on Linked In, the most valuable endorsements to me are "Open Source" and "Software Development."

[Brandon Rohrer]

Matt,

I love the idea! I am over-committed enough already that I won't be
able to support it personally, but if anyone felt inclined to carve
out an appropriately sized piece of work and provide a little bit of
mentorship to the student, they would have my full blessing. Core
BECCA development, add-ons, applications, are all fair game. It sounds
like a fun resource. I'm bummed I can't support it directly!

Brandon