Google Highschool Contest Winners

Posted by Sigurd on 12 February 2008

Since late November, hundreds of highschool students have been working around the world on about one thousand predetermined challenges set by ten open source software packages as part of Google's inaugral Highly Open Participation contest. Today we're excited to name the individuals who distinguished themselves while working with SilverStripe.

It was easy for us to determine our top three students, but much harder for us to rank them. All three completed a staggering quantity of professional work which was often creatively solved. Importantly, because student interest meant SilverStripe recieved 173 pieces of submitted work (up threefold from our expectation of 60!), we were delighted to see these three students earnestly helping other contestants through our forums and IRC (chat channel), otherwise we'd have not been able to cope with the unanticipated success of the contest.

First Prize: Wojtek Szkutnik, Poland.

Of the three, Wojtek Szkutnik from Poland distinguished himself by doing 29 tasks, the greatest number out of the hundreds of  students involved, and we are excited to announce him as the winner. He'll recieve an all-expenses paid trip to Google in California.

Even if another student had done the same quantity, Wojtek would still have gained a lead due to the diversity of work he did. Wojtek completed to a high standard at least one of almost every type of challenge we had: He produced over a dozen stylish themes, provided Esperanto and Polish translations, updated our documentation, built sites for non-profits, and did a presentation to promote SilverStripe, to name a few. In comparison to others who concentrated on a smaller variety of challenges, he had to learn much more about our project, community, and process; and overcome far more challenges.

We look forward to meeting Wojtek in person at the awards ceremony at Google's headquarters later in the year!

• Interview with Wojtek about SilverStripe and the contest

Three of the 15 themes by Wojtek: 

 

Second Place: Simon Welsh, New Zealand.

Officially we were going to only announce a single winner, however Simon Welsh did such a great effort we felt obliged to make a special mention.

Simon did 22 tasks, the second greatest number in the contest, tied with one other student. Contestants get paid based on the number of completed tasks, so Simon will recieve Google's maximum reward of USD500 cash and some of their swag. He helped extensively in our online community; our logs show he wrote more than 5000 lines on IRC during the contest, and we're pleased to see him regularly returning to help people needing support.

We were very happy to see Simon take the initiative to complete several tasks to a standard well beyond what we asked; for example, allowing his widgets to work in multiple languages (a great sign for someone only familiar with English!), and commiting intelligent enhancements to the core SilverStripe package instead of hacking workarounds in his code.

Simon's prolific ability to write so many drag and drop widgets was one of the chief reasons we recently automated the process of getting widgets into our download directory.

Well done Simon, it's great to see a New Zealander do so well!

• Interview with Simon about SilverStripe and the contest

 

Third Place: Jeff Chan, California.

Jeff Chan, like Simon, also completed 22 tasks, and with Wojtek, were the three students who did the greatest quantity of successful tasks across the entire contest.

Given we care strongly about usability, documentation, and good programming quality, it is the fact that all of Jeff's work was of a high standard that we're so pleased with his efforts.

Jeff completed several beautiful themes, interesting widgets, translated SilverStripe into Taiwan's dialect of Chinese, and researched how SilverStripe can be improved to suport right-to-left languages like Arabic (Good news: little work needs to be done). Like Simon, he will recieve USD500 and Google swag.

• Interview with Jeff about SilverStripe and the contest

In Summary

We were very keen to be involved when Google approached us, and very optimistic that the contest would be a success. We were especially interested in giving the world's top high school students a chance to get networked into popular open source packages, and this seems to have worked marvelously.

In the end, our main challenge was keeping on top of the onslaught of queries and to promptly review work to let students work on their next challenge, and it was fantastic to see a key tenet of open source--collaboration-- showing through in a competition. The students did great work, appeared to have lots of fun and gain valuable experience, and the SilverStripe project (and thus you, since it's all free to download!) benefitted hugely. Thanks very much to Google, and all the students involved!

You can learn more about the other projects and their winners at the Google contest page.