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Last December we announced the initial release of LiquidFun, a C++ library that adds particle physics, including realistic fluid dynamics, to the open-source Box2D. Today, we’re excited to be releasing LiquidFun 1.0!

New features in this release include:

• Multiple particle systems
• New particle behaviors: barrier, static-pressure, and repulsive
• Particle lifetimes
• Detection of stuck particles
• The ability to apply forces and impulses to particles
• Java support via SWIG
• A host of new demos: inside the existing Testbed application; and, a gorgeous new “EyeCandy” demo for Android

Several Googlers made LiquidFun possible: Howard Berkey, Alice Ching, Wolff Dobson, Dave Friedman, Stewart Miles, Jason Sanmiya, Kentaro Suto, and Ali Tahiri.

By Dave Friedman, Fun Propulsion Labs*

*Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that’s dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

The Google Open Source Programs Office recently co-sponsored the annual Buildroot Developers Meeting at our office in Brussels, Belgium.  Read more about their meeting below.

On February 3rd and 4th, the Buildroot project held its Developers Meeting at the local Google offices in Brussels. Buildroot is a tool that allows users to build embedded Linux systems by cross-compiling all necessary libraries, applications, the cross- compilation toolchain itself, the Linux kernel and other useful components. Buildroot is used by numerous companies and hobbyists, including Google for the Google Fiber devices, by many processor vendors and embedded system makers. It’s simple — you tell Buildroot what you want in your embedded Linux system through a kernel-like “menuconfig” interface, hit “make”, and voila! Your embedded Linux system is ready to run!

The Developers Meeting brought together 12 participants from countries all over the globe including Finland, France, the UK and the United States. Over the two day event, participants discussed hot topics and made key decisions for issues that prove difficult to discuss over mailing lists or IRC. We also worked on cleaning up the list of patches waiting to be integrated — a list that has grown significantly with the popularity of the project! Meeting physically not only allowed work to get done during the meeting, but also allowed contributors to get to know each other better.  We believe it will make our interactions online much more efficient in the future.

Join us at http://buildroot.org, or take a look at the detailed report of the meeting to learn more about our progress. Many thanks to our sponsors Google and Mind who made this meetup possible.

By Thomas Petazzoni, Buildroot Org Admin

The Google Open Source team recently sponsored the PyTennessee conference in Nashville. Adam Fletcher, an Engineer at Google and today’s guest blogger, volunteered at the conference and helped introduce Python to an enthusiastic group of students. …

Cross Posted from the Official Google Blog

Tobi Mueller started coding when his grandfather, who works in IT, gave him access to a spare PC. It was a sweet 286 machine which Tobi learned to program with the then-popular teaching language Pascal. He eventually became interested in free and open source software, but it was Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that helped transform Tobi into the free software contributor he is today.

Tobi was a GSoC student in 2007 for GNOME, a free software desktop environment. He’s been a regular contributor to the GNOME community ever since—and in 2012, Tobi was elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors.

Tobi is one of more than 7,500 students who have participated in Google Summer of Code program over the past nine years. Every summer, GSoC participants work with various organizations in the open source community, building important technical skills and gaining workplace experience. Students aren’t the only ones who benefit; their projects also give back to the open source community. Karen Sandler, GNOME’s executive director, told us how Google Summer of Code “encourages and empowers” new contributors and helps “invigorate projects.”

So if you’re a university student looking to earn real-world experience this summer, we hope you’ll consider coding for a cool open source project with Google Summer of Code. We’re celebrating the 10th year of the program in 2014, and we’d love to see more student applicants than ever before. In 2013 we accepted almost 1,200 students and we’re planning to accept 10 percent more this year.

You can submit proposals on our website starting now through Friday, March 21 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 190 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. There are a limited number of spots, and writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program—so be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice. For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source blog.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until March 21 to apply!

Posted by Carol Smith, Google Open Source team

Tobi Mueller started coding when his grandfather, who works in IT, gave him access to a spare PC. It was a sweet 286 machine which Tobi learned to program with the then-popular teaching language Pascal. He eventually became interested in free and open source software, but it was Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that helped transform Tobi into the free software contributor he is today.

Tobi was a GSoC student in 2007 for GNOME, a free software desktop environment. He’s been a regular contributor to the GNOME community ever since—and in 2012, Tobi was elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors.

Tobi is one of more than 7,500 students who have participated in Google Summer of Code program over the past nine years. Every summer, GSoC participants work with various organizations in the open source community, building important technical skills and gaining workplace experience. Students aren’t the only ones who benefit; their projects also give back to the open source community. Karen Sandler, GNOME’s executive director, told us how Google Summer of Code “encourages and empowers” new contributors and helps “invigorate projects.”

So if you’re a university student looking to earn real-world experience this summer, we hope you’ll consider coding for a cool open source project with Google Summer of Code. We’re celebrating the 10th year of the program in 2014, and we’d love to see more student applicants than ever before. In 2013 we accepted almost 1,200 students and we’re planning to accept 10 percent more this year.

You can submit proposals on our website starting now through Friday, March 21 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 190 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. There are a limited number of spots, and writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program—so be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice. For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source blog.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until March 21 to apply!

Posted by Carol Smith, Google Open Source team

Google Code-in wrapped up in January and the 20 Grand Prize Winners have been announced. Haiku, a veteran GCI organization, is here to talk about their experience and history of participating in GCI. This was the fourth year of Google Code-in, and…

Today is the final post in our series of guest posts from veteran Google Summer of Code 2013 organizations. OSGeo is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use. They have participated in Google Summer of Code for the past seven years!

OSGeo participated in Google Summer of Code 2013 with 22 accepted students from 15 software projects. This has been the seventh consecutive year of participation for OSGeo, with the highest success rate ever — 21 of 22 students got a positive final evaluation from their mentors. Two projects from 2013 that were particularly successful were:


ScribeUI: A GUI and tools for MapServer mapfile editing – Jessica Lapointe, mentored by Julien-Samuel Lacroix.

OpenTripPlanner: a stable and improved Android client for walk, bike, and transit routing based on OpenStreetMap and GTFS data – Vreixo Gonzáles, mentored by Stefan Steiniger.

Jessica and Vreixo were among the most autonomous, inventive, collaborative and communicative students of 2013. Both delivered a tool ready for use and further development. You can explore a full list of our wonderful GSoC students and their projects here.

Since our participation in GSoC began seven years ago, many students have contributed to our open source geospatial projects — several of which have joined our regular developer team or have even gone on to become GSoC mentors! We would like to thank all of the students, mentors and coordinators who contributed to the success of the program.

By Anne Ghisla, Hamish Bowman and Dustan Adkins
OSGeo GSoC Admin Team

Earlier this month, as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 10th year celebration, three of us from the Google Open Source Programs Office (Cat Allman, Jeremy Allison and Stephanie Taylor) traveled to Brussels, Belgium to attend the FOSDEM open source conference. We joined over 5,000 other FOSS enthusiasts to talk about GSoC and highlight the work of some of our students and mentors. 

We were honored to have a table dedicated to all things Google Summer of Code this year.  Twelve past students and mentors from 10 projects were kind enough to join us and talk to attendees about their organizations and projects. We even had a robot walking along the conference floor thanks to our friends at The Italian Mars Society!

During the two day conference Cat, Jeremy and I had the opportunity to meet and chat with hundreds of people. It was such a rewarding experience for all of us to have a chance to meet  many of the former students and mentors who have been part of the GSoC success story. We also talked to many members of open source projects interested in learning more about how to apply to this year’s GSoC program. The timing couldn’t have been better — the GSoC organization application opened the next day! 

Interested students came to the table and inquired about a variety of topics including the skills needed for the program, the time required to participate, best practices for writing a student proposal and the types of orgs that have participated. A list of all 440 mentoring organizations from the past nine years was available for folks to peruse. 

It was great to see so many students and mentors sporting GSoC t-shirts from many years ago, some of which could almost be considered vintage! There were also some Google Code-in shirts mixed in the bunch too.

Something we often hear from prospective students is that they don’t think they are “good enough” to be accepted as a GSoC student so they are leery of applying. We stress that the program is about hard work, dedication, and an interest in learning more about open source software development. You don’t have to be the most amazing coder the world has ever seen, but you do need to be hardworking and excited about the organization and project you are working on to be truly successful.

We’ve just recently announced the 190 open source projects that will act as mentoring organizations for 2014.  These two weeks before the student application period are a KEY time for students to research the organizations, find two or three of interest and learn more about how they work. This includes reaching out to organizations directly (before proposals begin on March 10), discussing the project’s proposed ideas list and really getting a feel for what organizations are looking for from a student proposal. 

Thanks to all of the students, mentors and open source friends who stopped by at FOSDEM. We hope to see you again next year!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs

As part of our “10 Things” celebration of the 10th instance of Google Summer of Code, the Google Open Source Outreach Team has been traveling around the world to meet with GSoC students and mentors and many people interested in learning more about the program. On Friday, February 28 Stephanie Taylor and I are excited to be headed to Norton University in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for FOSSASIA 2014.

FOSSASIA works together with Open Source projects in Asia and around the world to develop Free and Open Source software for social change. Along with running this annual conference, FOSSASIA brings developers, designers and start ups together while providing infrastructure and organizing code sprints, developer meet-ups and community gatherings. In addition, FOSSASIA has been selected as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization.

Attendees will have several chances to learn more about Google’s Open Source student programs during the conference, beginning with my keynote on Google Summer of Code on Friday, and a talk on Google Code-in by Stephanie on Saturday followed by a session of lightning talks and Q&A. If you’re a student considering applying to the program when applications open on March 10th, this will be a great chance for you to get your questions answered by students and mentors with first hand experience.

We hope to see you there!

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs Team

Lots of online education is delivered using video and text. However, opportunities for learners to do things and get feedback on their work are also important — after all, one does not learn to play the piano by watching videos of many virtuoso performances.

We’re excited to announce Oppia, a project that aims to make it easy for anyone to create online interactive activities, called ‘explorations’, that others can learn from. Oppia does this by modeling a mentor who poses questions for the learner to answer. Based on the learner’s responses, the mentor decides what question to ask next, what feedback to give, whether to delve deeper, or whether to proceed to something new. You can think of this as a smart feedback system that tries to “teach a person to fish”, instead of simply revealing the correct answer or marking the submitted answer as wrong. If you’d like to get an idea of what these explorations are like, you can try out some examples at www.oppia.org.

A unique feature of Oppia is that it allows multiple people from around the world to create and collaborate on explorations. They can do this through a web interface — no programming required.

Oppia gathers data on how learners interact with it, making it easy for exploration authors to spot and fix shortcomings in an exploration. They would do this by logging in, finding an answer that many learners are giving but which the system is not responding to adequately, and creating a new learning path for it, based on what they would actually say if they were interacting in-person with the learner. Oppia can then give this feedback to future learners.

                       
Oppia knows how to deal with numeric, text, and multiple choice inputs, as well as some more specialized types such as a clickable map and a code evaluator. We’ve also built an extensible framework that lets developers extend the range of input types that Oppia can understand.

The explorations created on an Oppia server can be embedded in any web page. These embeddings can refer to a particular version, so that further changes to the canonical version of the exploration do not automatically appear in the embedded one. This feature allows learning experiences that have been created using Oppia explorations to retain their integrity over time.

Oppia is built using Python and AngularJS on top of Google App Engine. You can download the source code; we hope you find it useful! Please feel free to contribute suggestions through our issue tracker, or contact us at our developers discussion group. We actively welcome new contributors, so if you would like to help out, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

By Sean Lip, Software Engineer, Google Research

We are pleased to announce the mentoring organizations that have been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code program. It was not an easy task, but after reviewing 371 applications, we have chosen 190 open source projects, of which 45 are new to Google Summer of Code. You can visit our Google Summer of Code 2014 program website for a complete list of the accepted orgs.

Over the next 14 days students interested in applying for the Google Summer of Code 2014 program can learn more about the 190 accepted open source projects before the student application period begins on Monday, March 10, 2014 at 19:00 UTC.

Each organization has compiled an “Ideas Page” that students will want to review carefully and consider how they might be able to contribute to the project. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project on an Ideas Page that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest a new idea to the organization! There are points of contact listed for each organization on their Ideas Page – students can contact the organization directly to discuss a new proposal. All organizations list their preferred method of communication on the organization homepage, available on the Google Summer of Code program website. We strongly encourage students to reach out to the organizations before they apply. Please see our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.

Congratulations to all of our future mentoring organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during this exciting 10th year of Google Summer of Code!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

• Anuruddha Premalal completed two projects — sr-side pagination and distributed caching, both of which have been shipped in our public releases with the caching being delivered in our 1.10.0 Release.
• Yanna Wu’s  XBRL integration work is merged into the master branch and can be tried out on our demo server under the reports menu. You can follow her documentation as a guide. This can be used straightaway for integration with MIX Market and also sets us on the right path for integrating with other centralized reporting tools.
• Andreas Weigel’s user-generated document module with mail-merge and WYSIWYG functionality has also been merged into the master branch; final documentation is on the wiki. Once a few more sample templates are complete, this will be shipped as our admin documents module; we’ll also be re-using the templating engine as a major component of our SMS notifications module.
• We are packaging up Avik Ganguly’s Excel-based import tool for an upcoming release; this tool is already being used for a live migration of data for Grameen Koota’s individual lending operations.

 

Our first year in the GSoC program went well; with three students, we finished the summer with three exciting new projects, and our user community is already diving in and starting to use them.

We had 337 students from 46 countries complete an astounding 2,113 tasks in the seven week contest. Students worked with 10 open source organizations on coding, documentation, training, user interface, research, outreach tasks, and quality assurance tasks. 60.2% of students completed at least three tasks in the contest.

Countries
The countries with the most students completing tasks are shown in the pie chart below:

Pre-university/high schools
The five schools with the most students completing tasks in Google Code-in 2013 are:

• Dunman High School in Singapore took the top spot this year with 20 students participating in this year’s contest, up from 13 in 2012.
• Technical School Electronic Systems (associated with Technical University- Sofia) in Bulgaria was in the top five for the 4th year in a row with 18 students.
• Sacred Heart Convent Sr. Sec. School, Jagadhri – India – 7
• Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology – Virginia, USA – 5
• Freehold High School – New Jersey, USA  – 4

Age of Students
The graph below depicts the ages of the students participating in this year’s contest.

Mentors
There were 194 dedicated mentors from 40 countries guiding students throughout the contest. This year we had mentors from a few new countries including Egypt, Jamaica and Liberia.

More interesting stats

• 67 students participated in at least one previous Google Code-in contest
• 9.5% of the students are female
• We had 11 grand prize winners this year range that were 15 or younger at the start of the contest
• Wikimedia and Apertium both had a whopping 273 tasks completed by students

A huge thank you to all of the students, mentors and organization administrators who made Google Code-in 2013 a success! And thank you to all the parents and teachers who encouraged students to learn more about open source software development.

This post comes to us straight from Sri Lanka courtesy of our guest writer, Lali Devamanthri. The Google Open Source Programs team recently held an event at The University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka – a university which has had the most Google Summer of Code students for an impressive 7 years in a row. Read more about the event below.

Google Summer of Code, a program that pumps new blood into the open source world, is celebrating its 10th instance this year. Behind-the-curtain faces who initiate this unique program have been visiting the countries with strong participation numbers in the program.

As a result, a team from Google’s Open Source Programs Office visited University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka on January 23, 2014. Since the program’s inception, 203 students from University of Moratuwa have participated, making it the highest number of students from a single university in the world. In total, there have been 265 students selected for the program over the last 9 years from all over Sri Lanka.

Over 320 people attended the event including past participants and mentors, open source luminaries, and prospective students. The event started by Kandyan dancers leading the way into the auditorium followed by the lighting of the traditional oil lamp.

After a warm welcome to all the invitees, the chief guest of the occasion, Hon. Vice Chancellor prof Ananda Jayawardena from University of Moratuwa spoke about the impact of open source software and how GSoC has worked as a driving force in the past several years. The Hon. VC also thanked all GSoC participants for bringing prestige to the University of Moratuwa.

Chris DiBona, Director of Social Impact and Open Source at Google, then spoke about how Google Summer of Code started, and expressed his excitement at the high participation rate from a small country like Sri Lanka. He concluded his talk with ideas about how to influence the younger generation to start participating in open source development. Two other Googlers from the Open Source team, Stephanie Taylor and Mary Radomile, talked about the steps involved in applying to this year’s program and the “10 things” GSoC initiative and described how the program will be enhanced to celebrate a decade of GSoC. One of these enhancements includes a 10% raise in the student stipend to 5500 USD!  Google Code-in (GCI), an open source coding contest for 13-17 year old students, was also introduced to the audience.

As the final invited guest speaker, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana spoke to the audience about the history of IT challenges in Sri Lanka and how open source communities have taken on a major role in solving them. He reminded GSoC participants to carry on contributing to the open source community past the end of the program and into their everyday lives.

Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana

The event concluded with the exchange of gifts, including a plaque presented by Google to the University of Moratuwa celebrating it’s exceptional participation rates in Google Summer of Code these past nine years. Guests were also treated to modern Raga music, local cultural entertainment, refreshments, and informal discussion between guests and students.

University of Moratuwa students enchanting the crowd with Raga music

The event successfully raised the awareness of GSoC and open source development. Attendees were highly motivated by the event and I’m sure there will be more and more Sri Lankan faces in both Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in in the years to come!

By Lali Devamanthri, GSoC 2012 Fedora student and GCI 2012 Fedora Mentor