Vote in the Model Your Town competition!

We’ve held past competitions open to students, and last December we announced the Google Model Your Town Competition, open to people from all over the globe. Folks created geo-located 3D models of their towns in stunning detail, and now it’s time for the 5 finalists to go head-to-head and for the public to vote on which one deserves the distinction of being the top winner.

Online voting is open from April 1 through May 1, 2010. Be sure to look at all the entries in detail on the competition website and then cast your vote for the one you deem to have created the best sense of place. We will announce the winner by May 15, 2010. A team from Google will travel to the winning town this Summer to hold an event for the residents and winners, and the local school district will receive US$10,000.

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Google SketchUp Team

Google Summer of Code 2010 is on!

Interested in learning more about open source software development and methodologies? Looking for a way to get that experience while getting paid? Look no further!

Through the Google Summer of Code™ program, we match college and university students with mentors from academia and industry to work on a three month coding project. You're welcome to propose a project that suits your specialized interests or to apply to work on a project proposed by one of our mentoring organizations. Successful student participants receive a $5000 stipend, an awesome t-shirt and valuable exposure to real world software development scenarios. You won't even need to leave home to work with this global community, with our members hailing from more than 100 countries. Best of all, no previous experience with open source development is required, and there will be projects available across a wide variety of technical areas and skill levels.

We're currently accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations. We'll publish the list of accepted open source projects, along with their suggested project ideas, on Thursday, March 18th. You'll have a few days to get to know your would-be mentors before student applications open on Monday, March 29th. However, there's no reason to wait to get involved with the Google Summer of Code community; check out the webpages from past instances of the program, review what other students have done and decide what open source projects look interesting to you. While there are no guarantees, if an organization has participated in the past, chances are they'll return again this year provided they choose to apply.

Looking for more background? We have a wide variety of resources to help you get started. First, read our program Frequently Asked Questions for an overview of Google Summer of Code. We also have a community wiki that has some great advice for student applicants and more information to give you an idea of the mentor's perspective. You can also check out a variety of videos, including information about the program and screencasts made by past students, in our program's community YouTube channel. If you still have questions or want to jump in after taking a look at the documentation, you can always find us in the Google Summer of Code Discussion group, in #gsoc on Freenode and on various social networking sites. You may also consider subscribing to the Google Open Source Blog for regular updates on the program.

Best of luck to all of our applicants, and here's to our sixth Google Summer of Code!

Post by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager - Open Source

Announcing the winners of the Street View trike contest

The votes have been tallied and the winners are in! Last October the Street View trike suggestions contest provided an opportunity for you to vote for your university campus, among a few other categories, to be featured on Google Maps. More than 25,000 suggestions were narrowed down to 24 finalists and more than a quarter million votes were cast.

Thanks to your votes, the most popular category was University Campuses with a whopping 70,000 votes! And we'd like to congratulate Rochester Institute of Technology who will soon be able to provide students, staff, and faculty – along with prospective students, reminiscing alumni, and empty-nest parents – with a hands-on look at campus life.

To read more about the contest and the category winners, check out the Google Lat Long blog post and stay tuned for more exciting special collections from the trike!

Posted by Dan Ratner, Senior Mechanical Engineer

Celebrating Computer Science Education Week

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Today kicks off the nation’s first Computer Science Education Week. The goal of this week is to encourage students to learn about the discipline that powers the computers, applications and technology they use everyday. Computer Science Education Week emphasizes that our society's aspirations will be met by individuals who have an increasingly deep understanding of computer technology.

We've been thinking about ways that Google could help with computer science education for several years. After all, our search engine has been used in education since its inception — how many essays, research papers and theses begin with a Google search? Today, we'd like to summarize some of what we've been doing at Google to advance CS education. Our efforts focus on four strategic areas, with an emphasis on computing in core curriculum.

Use of Google tools to support teaching and learning

Having a web-based shared document, spreadsheet or presentation that students in a group or class can all view and edit online has had an enormous impact on collaboration in education. So we provide a free suite of our communication & collaboration applications designed especially for schools and universities. We also used our tools and infrastructure to build and support a community of teachers who have developed classroom content and activities around these applications.

Increasing the access to and quality of Computer Science curriculum

We have many people at Google who know about all areas of computer science, many with backgrounds and experience in education. With this deep base of computer science knowledge, we developed Google Code University to help faculty update their undergraduate computer science curriculum, and the Summer of Code, which gives students the opportunity to develop programs for various open source software projects.

Integrating computing curriculum across K-12 core subjects

A group of Google engineers and K-12 "teaching fellows" is working on building and testing models of curriculum to encourage innovation. These curriculum models revolve around "computational thinking", a problem-solving technique that draws on the thinking and analysis skills that computer scientists use everyday. Our goal is to integrate computational thinking across subject areas in K-12 by connecting these skills, which are already a part of core curriculum, more explicitly to computer science. We're also taking this a step further by integrating simple programming concepts in appropriate areas of core K-12 curriculum, such as algebra. Our hope is that by making computer science more visible and showing its connection to every subject area, students will experience the full power and utility of technology in areas of interest to them. Integrating CS into other subjects will also have the key added benefit of leveling the playing field, so that many more students will have the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of computing.

Supporting organizations and individuals through community outreach

We've also worked for years with teachers and nonprofits to build early interest in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. Besides providing financial support and sponsorship for many external organizations, we've developed a number of scholarship and intern programs to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM and computer science. In addition to these formal programs, every day Googlers all over the world organize visits with students at nearby schools and community centers to teach, present workshops and tech talks, and to share their personal stories on how they became computer scientists and engineers.

We're absolutely delighted to be a co-sponsor of the first Computer Science Education Week. As a company, we've benefited so much from advances in computer science and the creativity of computer scientists. We also know that the next great innovators in computer science are out there, ready to be inspired to create technologies that change our world and benefit our society. We urge our children, parents, teachers and educational institutions to pay more attention to this critical field, and we will continue to do our share.

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP Research and Special Initiatives and Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

University of Waterloo's Artificial Intelligence Contest

Jeff Cameron is the Google Student Ambassador at the University of Waterloo, where he studies Computer Science and Math. As part of his role as ambassador, he recently hosted a great event focused on Artificial Intelligence, and we wanted to share his story with you here.

In the 2009 Artificial Intelligence Contest at the University of Waterloo, participants used both simple and sophisticated AI techniques to create programs that would intelligently play a simple game. The submitted programs competed in head-to-head tournaments to see how they all ranked compared to one another. Contestants could re-submit their code on the contest website as often as they liked, and the online leaderboard was updated once every hour with fresh tournament results.

A screenshot of the hourly leaderboard after the contest had been open for a few days.

The contest was initially supposed to stay open for two weeks, but was extended by another week due to unexpectedly high participation. Almost 300 participants were involved, with about 150 people submitting their entries to the final tournament. The contest webpage received over 50,000 hits from 38 countries. The final tournament took place at the Contest Finale Code Party, held at the University of Waterloo.

Pictures from the Contest Finale Codeparty. The very talented Mr. Jesse Onland serenades some happy coders with his mad banjo skills.

Some contestants huddle while adding the finishing touches to their entries.

The contest organizer (me), with this year's grand champion, Alex Stan.

Our congratulations goes out to the winner of this year's Google Artificial Intelligence Contest, Alexandru Stan! A big thank you also goes out to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club for organizing and hosting the contest. Full contest results are available here.

Posted by Jeff Cameron, Google Campus Ambassador at University of Waterlo