There are a bunch of coding tasks that involve just changing a line of code and the task even tells you which line to change. Those were meant to introduce you to coding but we couldn’t mark them as beginner tasks because of Google’s rule that you can only do up to 2 beginner tasks after which the rest will disappear from your dashboard. Considering we already had too many non coding beginner task, marking these as beginner task would have made some students miss the opportunity to try these if they had already completed up to 2 non beginner tasks. These tasks were very educative and hoped each student should have the chance to do at least one. Most of the students even doing these tasks are not beginners.
Doing a lot of them can take you up to top 10 but does not guarantee that you’ll be select amongst the winners. When selecting winners we’ll look at
Community involvement is a HUGE part of the program. The purpose of Google Code-In isn’t to simply see who’s the best at coding or who could rack up the highest number of tasks. It’s designed to introduce students to open-source communities and provide them a headstart in their careers.
Most of the successful participants of previous years took on side projects and did so much work for the community during their time in GCI that their names were even known among many community members. Coding isn’t even a requirement for contributing. There’s so many things you could which don’t require coding, and if you’d like to see more tasks towards a certain area, feel free to tell us. Being active in the IRC chat or helping out others when you can definitely goes a long way towards becoming successful.
Just curious, I’ve been doing quite a few coding tasks, but none of the tasks I’ve done have been very hard. (I did most of them in less than 30 minutes.) I haven’t seen any tasks that are any harder than this. Are you planning on putting harder tasks up later on, or will they stay pretty much the same difficulty level?
Hi. This year the amount of highest scoring students, from which finalists will be selected has doubled. You have to be in the top20 to have a chance for being a finalist. A lot of questions like yours are answered here: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/faq cheers
Top 20 this year. Remember that order doesn’t matter at all. The top student isn’t always the best student…happened one year. There are students who mentors can say repeatedly – that chasing task numbers will end badly for them…and won’t make them win, instead it just annoys mentors because they keep having to repeat themselves. To win you have to make mentors like you, annoying them is not the way to do that.
Another thing that can up your chances: Help other students, answer questions where you are capable, but don’t misinform either – if you don’t know – don’t answer. The other way to win is to do harder tasks. Doing 20+ easy tasks won’t make you win, mentors want to see you grow and take on progressively harder tasks.
I’ve got experience on my side Also worth repeating – over and over and over. Every year we say it and the kids don’t get it…it’s one of the frustrating aspects of this contest
Every single year I pay attention to the students who are helping the other students. I’m not a mentor for OpenMRS – but I already see a good handful of contenders just looking from the outside. If you’re helping each other – keep it up – but also ensure you do quality work. Mix it up and do tasks of varying difficulty levels.
Also worth repeating – over and over and over. Every year we say it and the kids don’t get it…it’s one of the frustrating aspects of this contest