Apps-android-commons: Applying to Google Code-In 2018
As applications for Google Code-In are now open, do you think our project would benefit from being a part of this? GCI is a competition that encourages high school kids to contribute to open source software. They do this by completing small tasks determined by us. A task is a small project that is expected to take between 3-5 hours of work to complete and can be about Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance(Testing), Design. We would have to create hundreds of tasks for students to work on during the contest period and would be responsible for assigning mentors to help students with questions and to review students’ work on the tasks.
Do you think this would be worth it, or would the hurdle of creating and evaluating tasks be too great for the free high school student labor to be worth it. Personally, this could come in handy for having our app tested more(We could maybe assign tasks such as "Find a bug in the browse feature and create a proper issue") and for creating some rough drafts of the outreach and design stuff outlined in #1889. Of course, how useful these would be is somewhat questionable. I would love to create the tasks etc. but I can't really help with anything as I will be too busy with schoolwork this year.
ilgazer
All 8 comments
Great idea! I think quality assurance (testing) and outreach, especially, would be excellent and would certainly be helpful to us. Getting new volunteers in is always good, too.
As you say, the main issue is the resources needed to mentor this. AFAIK the general rule of thumb is "it takes as much/more time to mentor something than it does to do it yourself", lol. Personally I really won't have time until next year. But if anyone is interested, it would be fantastic.
misaochan
on 9 Sep 2018
it takes as much/more time to mentor something than it does to do it yourself
I could see how mentoring high school kids about coding could take an absurdly long amount of time. But hopefully, for a task like "We are planning on having these meetings where we teach people how to use our app. Design a poster." would yield us 29 horrible posters and one great one which would be easy to mentor and easy to check.
Also, this could be an outreach opportunity of its own merit. A task like "Ask 3 people around you to identfy one good and one bad thing about our app." could work as a free advertisement (Not sure if Google would be amused however)
ilgazer
on 9 Sep 2018
@ilgazer I am definitely in support of participating in GCI, no questions there! ;) But we would need to find mentors who are up for it. Is anyone interested in volunteering?
misaochan
on 10 Sep 2018
I don't think I will mentor this year, but here is a set of tasks I mentored last year for Code-in, it is about taking screenshots in your own language, in order to put them into Google Play:
https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/issues/930
https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/issues/960
Last year it was moderately successful, with a handful of languages getting nice up-to-date screenshots
See also other issues with the "code-in" tag
nicolas-raoul
on 10 Sep 2018
One of the potential tasks for GCI could be badge designing for achievement module.
At the moment, we are displaying only a single design of the badge with a different color for each level. The new designs will help us diversify the badges that are assigned.
After this task, we also go forward with the idea of showcasing all the badges that have been unlocked.
_Would love to know others opinion !_
_I might not be available during the GCI due to college-work and prior commitments_
tanvidadu
on 11 Sep 2018
One of the potential tasks for GCI could be badge designing for achievement module.
At the moment, we are displaying only a single design of the badge with a different color for each level. The new designs will help us diversify the badges that are assigned.
After this task, we can go forward with the idea of showcasing all the badges that have been unlocked.
_Would love to know others opinion !_
_I might not be available during the GCI due to college-work and prior commitments_
tanvidadu
on 11 Sep 2018
Sounds like a great idea @tanvidadu !
misaochan
on 17 Sep 2018
Closing as GCI is over
domdomegg
on 24 Dec 2018
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Most helpful comment
One of the potential tasks for GCI could be badge designing for achievement module.
At the moment, we are displaying only a single design of the badge with a different color for each level. The new designs will help us diversify the badges that are assigned.
After this task, we can go forward with the idea of showcasing all the badges that have been unlocked.
_Would love to know others opinion !_
_I might not be available during the GCI due to college-work and prior commitments_