The 2014 Google Code-in contest has launched to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. The contest runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015.

For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development. For Google Code-in Google works with open source organizations, each of whom has experience mentoring university students in the Google Summer of Code program, to provide “bite sized” tasks for participating students to complete during the seven week contest. There will be a variety of different coding languages represented by the mentoring organizations. Generally there will be some that use Java, C++, Python, C, PHP, etc.

These tasks include:

* Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code

* Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more

* Outreach/Research Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing or studying problems and recommending solutions

* Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality

* User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Students earn one point for each task completed. Students will receive a certificate for completing one task and can earn a t-shirt when they complete three tasks. At the end of the contest each of the open source organizations will name two (2) grand prize winners for their organization based upon the students’ body of work. The grand prize winners will receive a trip to Google’s Mountain View, California, USA Headquarters for themselves and a parent or legal guardian for an award ceremony, an opportunity to meet with Google engineers, explore the Google campus and have a fun day in the San Francisco, California sun.

For more info, visit http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014