Posted by Alex Ames, Fun Propulsion Labs*

At Fun Propulsion Labs we spend some of our time building sample games to help demonstrate how to make easy-to-build, performant, cross-platform games. With the growth of Google Cardboard, we got to work and over many long evenings, feeding our animal hunger on sushi, we came up with Zooshi. Zooshi is an open source, cross-platform game written in C++ which supports:

• Android, Android TV, Windows, OSX, and Linux
• Google Cardboard
• Google Play Games Services sign-in and leaderboards on Android
• Level customization

Zooshi serves as a demonstration of how to build Android games using a suite of newly released and updated open source game technologies from Google:

• Motive drives our Animation system, giving life and movement to the characters and environment.
• CORGI, the Component Oriented Reusable Game Interface, is an Entity-Component system designed to allow users to define complicated game objects as collections of modular, custom-defined behaviors.
• FlatUI is a straightforward immediate mode GUI system with a light footprint that makes building up user interfaces a breeze.
• Scene Lab allows designers to design levels and edit entities from right in the game without needing to use an external editor.
• Breadboard provides an easy to use node based scripting system for editing entity behaviors that's accessible to designers without deep knowledge of programming.
• FPLBase is a cross-platform API layer, for abstracting low-level tasks like reading input and creation of graphical contexts.

As in our previous release, Pie Noon, we also made extensive use of Flatbuffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP.

You can download the game in the Play Store and the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to learn from the code to see how you can apply these libraries and utilities in your own Android games. Take advantage of our discussion list if you have any questions, and don’t forget to toss some sushi around while you’re at it!

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

Posted by Anthony Maurice, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

Fun Propulsion Labs at Google* is back with an exciting new release for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android game) to add support for Google Cardboard, letting you jump into the action directly using your Android phone as a virtual reality headset! Select your targets by looking at them and throw pies with a flick of the switch.

We used the Cardboard SDK for Android, which helps simplify common virtual reality tasks like head tracking, rendering for Cardboard, and handling specialized input events. And you might remember us from before, bringing exciting game technologies like FlatBuffers, Pindrop, and Motive, all of which you can see in use in Pie Noon.

You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon on Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code, and take a look at how we brought an existing game into virtual reality.

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

Posted by Jon Simantov, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

Fun Propulsion Labs at Google* is back today with some new releases for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android TV game) with networked multi-screen action, and we’ve also added some delicious new libraries we’ve been baking since the original release: the Pindrop audio library and the Motive animation system.

Pie Noon multi-screen action

Got an Android TV and up to 4 friends with Android phones or tablets? You’re ready for some strategic multi-player mayhem in this updated game mode. Plan your next move in secret on your Android phone: will you throw at an opponent, block an incoming attack, or take the risky approach and wait for a larger pie? Choose your target and action, then watch the Android TV to see what happens!

We used the NearbyConnections API from the most recent version of Google Play Games services to easily connect smartphones to your Android TV and turn our original Pie Noon party game into a game of turn-based strategy. You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon from Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code and take a look at how we used FlatBuffers to encode data across the network in a fast, portable, bandwidth-efficient way.

Pindrop: an open source game audio library

Pindrop is a cross-platform C++ library for managing your in-game audio. It supports cross compilation to Android, Linux, iOS and OSX. An early version of this code was part of the first Pie Noon release, but it’s now available as a separate library that you can use in your own games. Pindrop handles loading and unloading sound banks, tracking sound locations and listeners, prioritization of your audio channels, and more.

Pindrop is built on top of several other pieces of open source technology:

• SDL Mixer is used as a backend for actually playing the audio.
• The loading of data and configuration files is handled by our serialization library, FlatBuffers.
• Our own math library, MathFu, is used for a number of under-the-hood calculations.

You can download the latest open source release from our GitHub page. Documentation is available here and a sample project is included in the source tree. Please feel free to post any questions in our discussion list.

Motive: an open source animation system

The Motive animation system can breathe life into your static scenes. It does this by applying motion to simple variables. For example, if you’d like a flashlight to shine on a constantly-moving target, Motive can animate the flashlight so that it moves smoothly yet responsively.

Motive animates both spline-based motion and procedural motion. These types of motion are not technically difficult, but they are artistically subtle. It's easy to get the math wrong. It's easy to end up with something that moves as required but doesn't quite feel right. Motive does the math and lets you focus on the feeling.

Motive is scalable. It's designed to be extremely fast. It also has a tight memory footprint -- smaller than traditional animation compression -- that's based on Dual Cubic Splines. Our hope is that you might consider using Motive as a high-performance back-end to your existing full-featured animation systems.

This initial release of Motive is feature-light since we focused our early efforts on doing something simple very quickly. We support procedural and spline-based animation, but we don't yet support data export from animation packages like Blender or Maya. Motive 1.0 is suitable for props -- trees, cameras, extremities -- but not fully rigged character models. Like all FPL technologies, Motive is open source and cross-platform. Please check out the discussion list, too.

What’s Fun Propulsion Labs at Google?

You might remember us from such Android games as Pie Noon, LiquidFun Paint, and VoltAir, and such cross-platform libraries as MathFu, LiquidFun, and FlatBuffers.

Want to learn more about our team? Check out this recent episode of Game On! with Todd Kerpelman for the scoop!

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

Posted by Ankur Kotwal, Software Engineer

The holiday spirit is about giving and though we’re early into April, we’re still in that spirit. Today, we’re announcing that Google's Santa Tracker is now open source on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web and google/santa-tracker-android. Now you can see how we’ve used many of our developer products to build a fun and engaging experience that runs across the web and Android.

Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired games and an interactive North Pole village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.

Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.

Android app

• The Santa Tracker Android app is a single APK, supporting all devices running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and up. The source code for the app can be found here.

• Santa’s village is a canvas-based graphical launcher for videos, games and the tracker. In order to span 10,000 pixels in width, the village uses the Android resource hierarchy in a unique way to scale graphics without needing assets for multiple density buckets, thereby reducing the APK size.
• Games on Santa Tracker Android are built using a combination of technologies such as JBox2D (gumball game), Android view hierarchy (memory match game) and OpenGL with a purpose-built rendering engine (jetpack game).
• To help with user engagement, the app uses the App Indexing API to enable autocomplete support for Santa Tracker games from Google Search. This is done using deep linking.

Android Wear

• The custom watch faces on Android Wear provide a personalized touch. Having Santa or one of his friendly elves tell the time brings a smile to all. Building custom watch faces is a lot of fun but providing a performant, battery friendly watch face requires certain considerations. The watch face source code can be found here.
• Santa Tracker uses notifications to let users know when Santa has started his journey. The notifications are further enhanced to provide a great experience on wearables using custom backgrounds and actions that deep link into the app.

On the web

• Santa Tracker on the web was built using Polymer, a powerful new library from the Chrome team based on Web Components. Santa Tracker’s use of Polymer demonstrates how easy it is to package code into reusable components. Every scene in Santa's village (games, videos, and interactive pages) is a custom element, only loaded when needed, minimizing the startup cost of Santa Tracker.
• Santa Tracker’s interactive and fun experience is built using the Web Animations API, a standardized JavaScript API for unifying animated content - this is a huge leap up from using CSS animations. Web Animations can be written imperatively, are supported in all modern browsers via polyfills and Polymer uses them internally to create its amazing material design effects. Examples of these animations can be found using this GitHub search.

• Santa believes in mobile first; this year's experience was built to be optimized for the mobile web, including a fully responsive design, touch gesture support using Polymer, and new features like meta-theme color and the application manifest for add to homescreen.
• To provide exceptional localization support, a new i18n-msg component was built, a first for Web Components. Modeled after the Chrome extension i18n system, it enables live page-refresh for development but has a build step for optimization.

Now that the source code is also available, developers can see many of the parts that come together to make Santa Tracker. We hope that developers are inspired to make their own magical experiences.

Posted by Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google*

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

After months in development, the FlatBuffers 1.1 update is here. Originally released in June 2014, it’s a highly efficient open source cross-platform serialization library that allows you to read data without parsing/unpacking or allocating additional memory. It supports schema evolution (forwards/backwards compatibility) and optional JSON conversion. We primarily created it for games written in C++ where performance is critical, but it’s also useful more broadly. This update brings:

• an extensive overhaul to the Java API
• out-of-the-box support for C# and Go
• an optional verifier to make FlatBuffers practical in untrusted scenarios
• .proto parsing for easier migration from Protocol Buffers
• optional manual assignment of field IDs
• dictionary functionality through binary search on a key field
• bug fixes and other improvements thanks to 200+ commits from 28 contributors -- thank you!

Download the latest release from our github page and join our discussion list for more details.

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

Posted by Carol Smith, Google Open Source team

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

If you’re a university student looking to earn real-world experience this summer, consider writing code for a cool open source project with the Google Summer of Code program.

Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned in university to good use by working on an actual software project over the summer. Students receive a stipend and are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer, they strengthen their future employment opportunities. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Interested students can submit proposals on the website starting now through Friday, March 27 at 19:00 UTC. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 137 open source projects in this year’s program and decide which projects you’re interested in. Because Google Summer of Code has a limited number of spots for students, writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program — 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, join our Summer of Code mailing lists or join us on Internet relay chat at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early — you only have until March 27 to apply!

Posted by Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Originally posted to the Google Open Source Blog

Do you represent a free or open source software organization looking for new contributors? Do you love the challenge and reward of mentoring new developers in your community? Apply to be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code program! The organization application period is now open.

Now in its 11th year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as operating systems, language translations, content management systems, games, and scientific software. Since 2005, over 8,500 students from more than 100 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 480 mentoring organizations. Students gain exposure to real-world software development while earning a stipend for their work and an opportunity to explore areas related to their academic pursuits during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects as these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

The deadline for applying to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code is Friday, February 20 at 19:00 UTC (11am PST). The list of accepted organizations will be posted on the Google Summer of Code site on Monday, March 2nd. Students will then have two weeks to reach out to the accepted organizations to discuss their project ideas before we begin accepting student applications on March 16th.

Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details on the program. For more information you can check out the Mentor Manual, timeline and join the discussion group. You can also check out the Melange Manual for more information on using the website. Good luck to all of our mentoring organization applicants!

Today we're announcing the 1.0 release of MathFu, a cross-platform geometry math library for C++ game developers. MathFu is a C++ math library developed primarily for games focused on simplicity and efficiency.

It provides a suite of vector, matrix and quaternion classes to perform basic geometry suitable for game developers. This functionality can be used to construct geometry for graphics libraries like OpenGL or perform calculations for animation or physics systems.

The library is written in portable C++ with SIMD compiler intrinsics and has been tested on Android, Linux, OS X and Windows.

You can download the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to contribute to the project and join our discussion list!

By Stewart Miles, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google*

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

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog 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 who made Google Code-in 2013 awesome.


Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross posted from the Official Google Blog

Today marks the start of Google Code-in, a global online contest for pre-university students (13-17 years old) interested in learning more about open source software. Participating students have an opportunity to work on real world software projects and earn cool prizes for their effort.

For the next seven weeks students from around the world will be able to choose from an extensive list of tasks created by 10 open source projects. Some tasks require coding in a variety of programming languages, creating documentation, doing marketing outreach or working on user interfaces.

Participants earn points for each task they successfully complete to win T-shirts and certificates. At the end of the contest, 20 students will be selected as grand prize winners and flown to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Winners will receive a trip to San Francisco, a tour of the Googleplex and a chance to meet with Google engineers.

More than 1,200 students from 71 countries and 730 schools have participated in Google Code-in over the past three years. Last year, our 20 grand prize winners came from 12 countries on five continents!

We hope this year’s participants will enjoy learning about open source development while building their technical skills and making an impact on these organizations. Please review our program site for contest rules, frequently asked questions and to get started!

Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Carol Smith and Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

At Google we are passionate about introducing students from around the world to open source software development. Since 2005, Google has worked with over 10,000 students and over 440 open source projects in a variety of fields to create more code for the masses.

A call out to all students: if you have ever thought it would be cool to write code and see it make a difference in the world then please keep reading. We are excited to announce the next editions of  two programs designed to introduce students to open source software development, Google Summer of Code (for university students) and Google Code-in (for 13-17 year old students).

Google Summer of Code 

Back in 2005, Google made a commitment to support open source software contributors. In addition to our other programs to build and support the contributor base, we thought a great way to increase awareness was to introduce the wide world of open source to college students. Google Summer of Code was born: match student developers from around the world with open source software organizations to work on a project while on break from their universities. 

With over 8,300 mentors in 100 countries around the world, the 8,500 student developers have produced a stunning 50 million lines of code. The program will now be reaching its 10th instance in 2014. 

We told you on the Official Google Blog just a few highlights of what we’ll be up to this year, and now we want to tell you all the details:  

1. 10 visits to countries with high participation throughout the year.
2. 10 developer events in promotion of the program. 
3. 10 mentors who have participated in Google Summer of Code will be featured on our open source blog.
4. 10% additional student stipend (a total of $5500 for students who successfully complete the whole program).
5. 10% more students than we’ve ever had participate in the program before.
6. 10 more mentoring organizations than we’ve ever had in the program will be participating in Google Summer of Code 2014
7. 10 year student reunion event will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus next year for all the students who have participated in the program. 
8. 10 year reunion mentor summit will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus for all our Google Summer of Code organization alumni.
9. 10 students/organizations will be chosen to highlight their work at the Google booths at open source events throughout the year.
10. 10 student projects from the past nine years will be highlighted on the open source blog and YouTube.

We’re pleased to be running a program that touches a lot of lives around the world, and we hope this will be a celebration of all the accomplishments we’ve seen from so many of our participants. Watch this blog for announcements about our travel and our efforts over the next year. Here’s to 10 Things! 

Google Code-in - Program starts for students November 18th

For the fourth consecutive year we are thrilled to announce Google Code-in, an international contest designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source development. Open source projects are about more than just coding, and this contest highlights a variety of ways to contribute to open source projects. Every year, open source software is becoming more important around the globe; from government, healthcare, relief efforts, gaming, to large tech companies and everything in between. 

When you read the term open source do you think:

• What is open source?
• What types of work do open source projects do?
• I’ve only taken one computer science class, can I contribute to an open source project?
• I’m not really into coding, what else can I do to contribute to open source?
• I’ve never participated in open source or an online contest before, can someone help guide me?
• Open source sounds cool, how can I get started?

If you’ve wondered about any of these questions and are a pre-university student (age 13-17) then we hope you will join in the fun and excitement of the Google Code-in contest starting Monday, November 18th. 

The different categories of tasks that students will be able to work on include:

1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
3. Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Over the past 3 years we have had over 1200 students from 71 countries complete tasks in the contest. In April, we flew the 20 Google Code-in 2012 Grand Prize winners and a parent to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters for a 5 day/4 night trip where they enjoyed talking with Google engineers, an awards ceremony, a Google campus tour, and a full day of fun in San Francisco. 

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in 2013 site for more details on how to sign up and participate. And please help us spread the word to your friends around the globe! If you are a teacher that would like to encourage your students to participate, please send an email to our team at [email protected]. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have. 

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. We will announce the 10 open source organizations that will be participating in the contest on November 1. The Google Code-in contest starts for students on November 18, 2013. We look forward to welcoming hundreds of students from around the world into the open source family again this year.

We hope you will help us spread the word about these two programs to all the pre-university and university students in your life. Stay tuned to this blog for more announcements in the coming weeks about both programs.


Written by Carol Smith and Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source team

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

If you’re a university student with CS chops looking to earn real-world experience this summer, consider writing code for a cool open source project with the Google Summer of Code program.


Over the past eight years more than 6,000 students have “graduated” from this global program, working with almost 400 different open source projects. Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned in university to good use by working on an actual software project over the summer. Students are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer they strengthen their future employment opportunities in fields related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Interested students can submit proposals on the website starting now through Friday, May 3 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 177 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. Because Google Summer of Code has a limited number of spots for students, writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program. 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, join our Summer of Code mailing lists or join us on Internet relay chat at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until May 3 to apply!


Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Lode Vandevenne, Software Engineer, Compression Team

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

The Zopfli Compression Algorithm is a new open sourced general purpose data compression library that got its name from a Swiss bread recipe. It is an implementation of the Deflate compression algorithm that creates a smaller output size compared to previous techniques. The smaller compressed size allows for better space utilization, faster data transmission, and lower web page load latencies. Furthermore, the smaller compressed size has additional benefits in mobile use, such as lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use. The higher data density is achieved by using more exhaustive compression techniques, which make the compression a lot slower, but do not affect the decompression speed. The exhaustive method is based on iterating entropy modeling and a shortest path search algorithm to find a low bit cost path through the graph of all possible deflate representations.

Zopfli

The output generated by Zopfli is typically 3–8% smaller compared to zlib at maximum compression, and we believe that Zopfli represents the state of the art in Deflate-compatible compression. Zopfli is written in C for portability. It is a compression-only library; existing software can decompress the data. Zopfli is bit-stream compatible with compression used in gzip, Zip, PNG, HTTP requests, and others.

Due to the amount of CPU time required — 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more than zlib at maximum quality — Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network many times, for example, static content for the web. By open sourcing Zopfli, thus allowing webmasters to better optimize the size of frequently accessed static content, we hope to make the Internet a bit faster for all of us.


Lode Vandevenne is a software engineer based in Zürich. He has a special interest in compression algorithms, and implemented Zopfli as his 20% time activity.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

I am proud to share the news that Google Summer of Code 2013 will be happening again this year.

This will be the 9th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past eight years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 100 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student who would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2013 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!


Written by Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs Office

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog


We are thrilled to announce the 20 grand prize winners of Google Code-in 2012, a contest designed to introduce teenagers to the world of open source software development. Congratulations to all 334 students from 36 countries who participated in the contest, completing 1,925 tasks.

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

Students are listed alphabetically (by first name) with their country and the organization that they worked with during Google Code-in 2012.

Agustín Zubiaga, Uruguay - Sugar Labs
Akshay S Kashyap, India - BRL-CAD
Aleksandar Ivanov, Bulgaria - RTEMS
Aneesh Dogra, India - Sugar Labs
Aviral Dasgupta, India - Sahana Software Foundation
Cezar El-Nazli, Romania - BRL-CAD
Conor Flynn, Ireland - Apertium
Drew Gottlieb, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Illya Kovalevskyy, Ukraine - KDE
Liezl Puzon, United States - Sahana Software Foundation
Mathew Kallada, Canada - RTEMS
Matthew Bauer, United States - The NetBSD Project
Mingzhe Wang, China - The NetBSD Project
Mohammed Nafees, India - KDE
Nicolás Satragno, Argentina - The Fedora Project
Przemysław Buczkowski, Poland - Haiku
Qasim Iqbal, Canada - Apertium
Samuel Kim, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Vladimir Angelov, Bulgaria - Haiku
Ze Yue Wu, Australia - The Fedora Project



These 20 pre-university students completed an impressive 576 tasks ranging from annotating face recognition for disaster response efforts to creating videos and screencasts to teach others about the organization’s software to writing scripts to develop MySQL tables. In late April, the grand prize winners will be flown to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA along with a parent or legal guardian for a four night visit.  During the trip the students will have the opportunity to participate in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers, have a full day of fun exploring San Francisco, and make new friends also interested in open source development.

A couple of quotes from the mentors that worked with this year’s Google Code-in students:

'They're surprisingly motivated, excited to contribute, genuinely interested, and productive to boot. Initial estimates indicate we may get years worth of work done and one student has already earned commit status, two others are getting close.'  -- Sean Morrison, BRL-CAD Organization Administrator and Mentor, two weeks after the start of the contest 

‘One of my favorite quotes, one you probably have seen before, from a student: "this is my first patch to an open source project"’ -- Walter Bender, Sugar Labs Organization Administrator and Mentor

And that is what this contest is all about, introducing students to the many ways that they can contribute to open source software development. An enormous thank you to all of the students, IT teachers, parents, mentors and organization administrators who made the Google Code-in 2012 a success!

Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Ashleigh Rentz, Editor Emerita

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

… and Go! The Google Code-in 2012 contest has officially started!  If you are a 13-17 year old pre-university (high school) student interested in computer science who would like to learn more about open source software development while earning cool prizes, sign up on our program site today.  Students have the opportunity to select tasks from 5 categories (coding, documentation/training, quality assurance, research/outreach and user interface) that are designed by 10 open source organizations that will provide mentors for the students.  Students earn certificates, t-shirts and Grand Prize Winners will win a trip for themselves and a parent or legal guardian to Google’s Mountain View California campus in 2013. Each of the 10 open source organizations will choose 2 of the 5 students that complete the most tasks with their organization as their Grand Prize Winners for a total of 20 Grand Prize Winners for Google Code-in 2012- that’s twice as many Grand Prize Winners as last year!


Last year, 542 students from 56 countries competed in the contest: this year you could be one of the students from around the world learning new skills and making new friends by experiencing the awesome world of open source development.

If you’d like to sign up, please review the Contest Rules and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on our program site. You can join our discussion list to ask any other questions. For details on important dates for the contest, see the calendar. If you meet the eligibility requirements you can create your account on the program site and start claiming tasks today!

Join us today, Nov 26th, as members of Google’s Open Source Programs Office host a Live Google Code-in Hangout on Air on the Google Education page at 2pm PST to discuss details of the contest and to answer questions from viewers. If you can’t make the live Hangout on Air it will be recorded and posted on our Google Open Source Student Programs YouTube Channel within a couple of days.

The contest ends on January 14, 2013 so start claiming tasks today.  Good luck and have fun!


Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog


Today marks the launch of the third Google Code-in, an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. Globally, open source software development is becoming a major factor in all industries from governments, healthcare, and relief efforts to gaming and large tech companies.

When you hear the term “open source” do you ask yourself:

• What exactly is open source?  
• How can I get involved in open source software development if I’m just starting to learn how to code?
• What types of work do open source projects do?  
• I’d like to work on open source but I’m not really a coder, what else can I do?
• I’ve never worked on a global project using IRC and chat groups: can someone help me?

If you’ve wondered about any of these questions and are a pre-university student (age 13-17) then you should join in on the fun with the Google Code-in contest starting November 26, 2012.

From late November to mid January, students will be able to work with 10 open source projects on a variety of tasks. These projects have all successfully served as mentoring organizations working with university students in our Google Summer of Code program.

The types of tasks students will be working on will fall into the following categories:

1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
3. Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Over the last two years we have had 904 students compete in the contest from 65 countries. This past January we announced the 10 Grand Prize Winners for the 2011 Google Code-in. In June, we flew the winners and a parent/legal guardian to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters for a 5 day/4 night trip complete with an awards ceremony, talks with Google engineers, Google campus tour, and a full day of fun in San Francisco.

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in site for more details on how to sign up and participate. Please help us spread the word to your friends around the globe. If you are a teacher who would like to encourage your students to participate, please send an email to our team at [email protected]. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. We will announce the 10 open source organizations that will be participating in the contest on November 12. The Google Code-in contest starts on November 26, 2012, and we look forward to welcoming hundreds of students from around the world into the open source family.


Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By the Go team



In November 2009 Google announced the Go project, a new open source programming language. Since then more than 200 outside contributors have made thousands of contributions to the code, tests, and documentation. The open source community has been essential to Go's success.

It is a great pleasure to announce today that the Go project has reached a stable point we are calling Go version 1, or Go 1 for short. Go 1 is the result of months of work refining the specification, improving the implementation, increasing portability and re-working and adjusting the standard library. Go 1 offers compatibility for future growth: programs written to the Go 1 specification will work dependably for years to come even as Go continues to develop.

The benefits of Go 1 are also available to Google App Engine developers, as Go 1 is now the standard Go runtime on Google App Engine.

Go 1 is a consistent, portable, dependable base upon which to build programs, projects, and businesses. To learn more about Go 1, hear what the gophers have to say at the Go blog. For more information about Go in general, visit golang.org, which has documentation, references, articles, and even an interactive tour of the language.


When he's not traveling the world, the Go Gopher lives in Paris with his collection of medals won at international staring competitions. He enjoys "The Wire" and any movies by Werner Herzog.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog


Today at FOSDEM I was proud to announce Google Summer of Code 2012.

This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2012 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Carol Smith, Google Code-in Program Manager, Open Source Team

Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog


Listen up, future coders of the world: today we’re launching the second annual Google Code-in competition, an open source development contest for 13-17 year old students around the world. The purpose of the Google Code-in competition is to give students everywhere an opportunity to explore the world of open source development. We not only run open source software throughout our business, we also value the way the open source model encourages people to work together on shared goals over the Internet.

Open source development involves much more than just computer programming, and the Google Code-in competition reflects that by having lots of different tasks to choose from. We organize the tasks into eight major categories:

1. Code: Writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation: Creating and editing documents
3. Outreach: Community management and outreach, as well as marketing
4. Quality Assurance: Testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. Research: Studying a problem and recommending solutions
6. Training: Helping others learn more
7. Translation: Localization (adapting code to your region and language)
8. User interface: User experience research or user interface design and interaction

On November 9, we’ll announce the participating mentoring organizations. Mentoring organizations are open source software organizations chosen from a pool of applicants who have participated in our Google Summer of Code program in the past. Last year we had 20 organizations participate.

Last year’s competition drew 361 participating students from 48 countries, who worked for two months on a wide variety of brain-teasing tasks ranging from coding to video editing, all in support of open source software. In January, we announced the 14 grand prize winners, who we flew to our headquarters in Mountain View, California to enjoy a day talking to Google engineers and learning what it’s like to work at Google, and another day enjoying the northern California sights and sun.

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in site for more details on how to sign up and participate. Our goal this year is to have even more pre-university students in the contest than last time around, so help us spread the word, too.

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. The Google Code-in contest starts on November 21, 2011, and we look forward to seeing the clever and creative ways all of the participants tackle their open source challenges.


Carol Smith is Google Code-in Program Manager, Open Source Team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor