CORVALLIS, Ore. - High school students can soon participate in the Google Code-in Contest with the assistance of the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University.

In this contest, which begins Nov. 22, students aged 13-18 will be provided with a list of tasks that could improve various open source software projects. The OSU Open Source Lab, one of 20 organizations participating in this initiative, will ask students to create logo artwork, write code, produce documentation, fix software glitches and do other tasks.

Students do not need to have prior programming experience to complete many of the contest tasks.

“We are excited to participate in the Google Code-in contest,” said Jeff Sheltren, operations manager for the OSU Open Source Lab. “We’ve mentored university students in open source development for the past five years in Google’s Summer of Code program and had great success. We look forward to helping high school students engage with open source software projects and communities.”

This project is one of several K-12 educational initiatives the lab participates in, including the Oregon Virtual School District and the TeachEngineering Project.

In the Google Code-in Contest, successful participants will receive a T-shirt from Google and have the opportunity to win up to $500 for their submissions. Full details are available online at http://google-melange.com. To stay up to date on working with the Oregon State University Open Source Lab for the Google Code-in contest, people may visit http://osuosl.org/gci or follow @osuosl on Twitter.

About the OSU Open Source Lab:

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is the home of growing, high-impact open source communities. Its world-class hosting services enable the Linux operating system, Apache web server, the Drupal content management system and more than 50 other leading open source software projects to collaborate with contributors and distribute software to millions of users globally. Through custom software development, vendor partnerships and industry events like the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), the Lab’s staff and students encourage open source adoption in education, government, health care and other sectors. For more information, visit http://osuosl.org.