Tag Archives: Coding

Students can be part of Google Code-in with SugarLabs

Posted on by
1

A global, online open source development & outreach contest for pre­-college students ages 13-­17

The Google Code-­in contest gives students around the world an opportunity to explore the world of open source development. Google not only runs open source software throughout our business, we value the way the open source model encourages people to work together on shared goals over the internet.

Give it a try from December 7th, 2015 to January 25th, 2016!

Participants complete “tasks” of their choice for a variety of open source software projects. Students can earn t-­shirts, certificates, and hooded sweatshirts for their work. Each software project will name two students as their grand prize winners and those students win a four day trip to in Mountain View, CA, USA in June 2016.

Since open source development is much more than just computer programming, there are lots of different kinds of tasks to choose from, broken out into five major categories:

1. Code: Writing or refactoring code

2. Documentation/Training: Creating and editing documentation and helping others learn

3. Outreach/Research: Community management and outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions

4. Quality Assurance: Testing to ensure code is of high quality

5. User interface: User experience research or user interface design

This year students can work with 14 open source organizations: Apertium, Copyleft Games Group, Drupal, FOSSASIA, Haiku, KDE, MetaBrainz, OpenMRS, RTEMS, SCoRe, Sugar Labs, Systers, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia Foundation.

Over the past five years, over 2200 students from 87 countries completed at least one task in the contest. This year we hope to have even more students participate globally. Please help us spread the word and bring more students into the open source family!

Visit g.co/codein to learn more about the contest. For even more information and contest updates, read our Frequently Asked Questions, follow our blog or join our mailing list.

The Google Code-­in contest starts on December 7, 2015!

 

Geeking out young: gadgets and coding need to be core in US schools

Posted on by
1

By Steve Dent origanily posted in Engadget Nov 11th, 2013

Remember readin’, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic? According to our Rethinking Education panelists, the three R’s need to be joined by a “C” — for computer science — or the US risks getting run over by more progressive nations. That was the opinion of Rodrigo Arboleda from the One Laptop Per Child organization, who spoke at Engadget Expand along with Jeff Branson from SparkFun and Pat Yongpradit from Code.org.

…Though many feel that there are already too many gadgets and too much internet in kids’ lives, Arboleda and One Laptop per Child have the opposite viewpoint. He said that a laptop could become a precious, transformational object for a child, taking them to new places in their personal development — especially if coupled with internet access. As for the sorry state of computer science in schools stateside, Yongpradit emphasized the need for teacher certification programs in computing, building a curriculum the same way math and sciences were: one block at a time. Arboleda took it a step further, saying that access to digital tools and internet has become “a basic human right” — severely disadvantaging those who lack them.

Watch the video and read the full article here.