I was a GCI Mentor in the year 2017 with FOSSASIA organization. This blog covers up my experience with the GCI participants.
Google Code-In program is for the pre-university students (ages 13–17) conducted by Google every year. The program aims to promote open source software projects and development. Some of the open source organization which participates are SCoRe, FOSSASIA, Drupal, Wikimedia etc.
In the FOSSASIA, During the start of the program, students are given an opportunity to experience open source development culture. They are given a task in which they have to set up a small website to share FOSSASIA GCI student’s and GCI mentor’s details. It came out to be a great success with awesome website creation and more importantly, it was developed by a nice little community of GCI students.
Website is up here: https://gci17.fossasia.org/
There were another kind of tasks as well like writing a blog post on their experience during the GCI program, deploying various web-app projects on Google Kubernetes and much more!
I wanted to the part of GCI program as a mentor because I’m a tech enthusiast. I keep on learning new things. I never had anyone to mentor me when I have started. That is one of the major reason for me to be interested in mentoring. To encourage more participation, I also organized a workshop in school by name Jayshree Periwal International School, Jaipur.
That’s me! getting them started with open source development.
Jayshree Periwal International School, Jaipur was in top 5, ranking 4th in the year 2017 in terms of participation (proud moment!)
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/02/google-code-in-2017-more-is-merrier.html
At the end of the session, we had a final group photograph. Unfortunately, I was not in the photo but my friend helped a lot during this workshop. So, this one is for him!
Young and Electrifying minds! Big thanks to their class teacher who helped us getting approval from school authorities to conduct an open source workshop and my friend who helped me a lot!
My overall impression of Google Code-In was very positive. I enjoyed mentoring and the joyful satisfaction that came with it. It was a great experience to be a mentor!