GCI 2018 - Wrap-up report

Better late than never… Here’s a quick report on GCI 2018.

Google Code-in is the annual contest for students between 13 and 17. It brings together teenagers and open source organizations with the idea of giving “pre-university students” an experience of real world coding which might inspire them to consider Computer Science in their future educational and career plans.

At the end of the contest, each organization chooses five finalists. These finalists each receive limited edition Google Code-in hoodies. Two finalists from each organization will be grand prize winners and go on a trip to Google Headquarters in California.

Haiku’s Grand Prize Winners 2018:

• Bach Nguyen from United States (52 completed tasks)
• Ojasva Jain from India (28 completed tasks)

Haiku’s Finalists:

• a.u.naseef (8 completed tasks)
• arnavbhatt288 (13 complete tasks)
• claire (8 completed tasks)
• nishanth1232 (12 completed tasks)

We congratulate all participants and hope all of you have made progress during this journey. It has been a pleasure having you work with us. Your development over these 7 weeks has been impressive and we’d be happy to have all of you as potential new users and/or contributors. From the coding assignments, to documentation, to design, to all the extra work done, Haiku is glad for all the tasks completed. We would love to see all of you around Haiku!

To every one of the mentors who committed their time and vitality amid these bustling weeks, thanks for imparting your skill and experience. Without you the program may have never had the opportunity to introduce Open Source to these participants at such a young age. We are thankful for the time you put in, encouraging students and sharing your knowledge.

Some of the contributions to this year’s run of GCI with Haiku include:

• 113 students completed our “New to Haiku” task this year. This task introduced students to Haiku by having them install and do a series of 9 steps and then send a screenshot showing they completed the steps.
• Supplying icons, screenshots, and categories almost 200 packages in HaikuDepot.
• Designing a system to automate taking screenshots for the User Guide via hey-scripting.
• Porting software by creating new recipes for HaikuPorter.
• Finding bugs and providing fixes for applications at HaikuArchives.
• “Learning How to Code” by reading the books of that series by Haiku developer DarkWyrm.
• Presenting Haiku at their schools or other local groups.

and much more!

We thank Scott McCreary for once more taking over the administering as an Org. Admin. This year Luc Schrijvers (Begasus) will make the trip to meet the winners as they both picked him as the mentor they would like to meet.