Google Data

It’s time to announce this year’s 20 grand prize winners in the Google Code-in 2013 contest! Over the last seven weeks, 337 teenagers from 46 countries have been busy working with open source organizations to write code, fix bugs, create documentation and find creative ways to get other students interested in participating in open source, completing a total of 2,113 tasks! Congratulations to all of the students who participated in this year’s contest! You should all be very proud of yourselves.

Each of the 10 open source organizations that worked with students during the contest chose 2 students to be their organization’s grand prize winners based on the students’ comprehensive body of work.

The grand prize winners are listed below alphabetically (by first name) with their country and the organization that they worked with during Google Code-in 2013.

Akshaykumar Kalose, United States - Sahana Software Foundation
Anurag Sharma, India - Sahana Software Foundation
Benjamin Kaiser, Australia - KDE
Chirayu Desai, India - RTEMS
Dalimil Hájek, Czech Republic - Apertium
Daniel Ramirez, United States - RTEMS
Freeman Lou, United States - Haiku
Ignacio Rodríguez, Uruguay - Sugar Labs
Jacob Burroughs, United States - BRL-CAD
Jorge Alberto Gómez López, El Salvador - Sugar Labs
Mark Klein, United States - Drupal
Mateusz Maćkowski, Poland - Wikimedia
Matt Habel, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Mikhail Ivchenko, Russian Federation - KDE
Peter Amidon, United States - BRL-CAD
Puck Meerburg, Netherlands - Haiku
Samuel Kim, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Sushain Cherivirala, United States - Apertium
Theo Patt, United States - Wikimedia
Vijay Nandwani, India - Drupal

Congratulations to these 20 pre-university students who completed a remarkable 650 tasks during the contest. We asked the students to tell us a bit about their favorite tasks they worked on in the contest and here are descriptions of a few of the tasks in the students’ words:

The task was about creating a screencast of coding a Hello world module for Drupal 8. It was an ordinary task but it helped me gain recognition in the whole Drupal community. The video was also appreciated and discussed on social networks. -- Vijay Nandwani 

One of my favorite tasks was revamping the "other languages" feature on the mobile Wikipedia, for which I both added features and noticeably reduced page load times. -- Theo Patt 

My favorite task was to modify DriveSetup to make the window zoom-able. It seemed like a simple task but I was still unfamiliar with the Haiku API, so there was a bit of challenge to it. -- Freeman Lou 

I added support for new types of Flickr URLs for UploadWizard extension for MediaWiki. -- Mateusz Maćkowski

For their grand prize trip the 20 students will be flown to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters along with a parent or legal guardian in mid April for a four night trip. Students will talk with Google engineers, take part in an awards ceremony, enjoy time exploring San Francisco and best of all make new friends also interested in technology and open source development.

We have a special surprise in store for this year’s grand prize winners -- each year the students tell us they’d like to meet the mentors that they worked with during the contest so this year we are doing just that -- one mentor from each organization will be joining the students on the grand prize trip.

A huge thanks to all of the students, mentors, organization administrators, teachers and parents that made Google Code-in 2013 awesome!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs