FOSSASIA at Google Code-In 2016 Grand Prize Trip

This year FOSSASIA came up with a whopping number of GCI participants, making it to the top. FOSSASIA is a mentor organization at the Google Code-In contest, which introduces pre-university students towards open source development. Every year Google conducts the grand prize trip to all the GCI winners and I represented FOSSASIA as a mentor. FOSSASIA GCI winners and Mentor at Google Mountain View Campus. Day 1: Meet and Greet with the Diverse Communities We all headed towards the San Francisco Google office and had a great time interacting with members from diverse open source organizations from different parts of the world. I had some interactive conversations with the kids, on how they scheduled their sleep hours in order to complete the task and got feedback from the mentors from different time zones! I was also overwhelmed while listening to their interests apart from open source contributions. “I am a science enthusiast, mainly interested in Computer Science and its wide range of applications. I also enjoy playing the piano, reading, moving, and having engaging conversations with my friends. As a participant in the GCI contest, I got the chance to learn by doing, I got an insight of how it is like to work on a real open-source project, met some great people, helped others (and received help myself). Shortly, it was amazing, and I'm proud to have been a part of it. ” Shared by one of our Winner Oana Rosca. There were people from almost 14 different countries, in fact, FOSSASIA, as a team, was the most diverse group :) Day 2: Award Ceremony We had two winners from FOSSASIA, Arkhan Kaiser from Indonesia and Oana Rosca from Romania. There were 8 organizations with 16 winners. The award ceremony was celebrated on day 2 and each winner was felicitated by Chris DiBona, the director of the Google open source team. Talks by Googlers We had amazing speakers from Google who spoke about their work, experiences, and journey to Google. Our first speaker was Jeremy Allison, a notable contributor to “Samba” which is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol. He spoke on “How the Internet works” and gave a deeper view of the internet magic. We had various speakers from different domains such as Grant Grundler from the Chrome team, Lyman Missimer from Google Expeditions, Katie Dektar from the Making and Science team, Sean Lip from Oppia(Googler and Oppia org admin), Timothy Papandreou from Waymo and Andrew Selle from TensorFlow. Day 3: Fun Activities We had various fun activities organized by the Google team. I had a great time cruising towards the Alcatraz island.  Later we had a walk on the Golden Gate bridge. Here comes the fun part of the tour “the cruise dinner” which was the best part of the day. Day 4: End of the trip Oana, Arkhan and I gave a nice presentation about our work during GCI. We spoke about all the amazing projects under FOSSASIA. One cool thing we did…

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FOSSASIA Code-In Grand Prize Winners Gathering at Google Headquarter

FOSSASIA was thrilled to be selected once again as a mentor organisation of Google Code-In (GCI) 2015 - a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development. Together with 13 other orgs we reached out to 980 students from 65 countries completed a total number of 4,776 tasks. As a part of our participation, I got a chance to present FOSSASIA at the Grand Prize Winners trip. FOSSASIA Team, photo by Jeremy Allison GCI 2015 Awards Ceremony 28 grand prize winners, their parents along with one mentor from each participating organisation were invited to a trip to the Bay Area as a reward to their hard work during the last GCI program. Students had a chance to meet with mentors and to interact with their fellow students from other projects, enjoyed a few days in San Francisco and received many cool gifts/swags from Google. Chris DiBona and Jason Wong, photo by Jeremy Allision Chris DiBona - Director of Open Source at Google - a super busy man who was so kind to spend his morning personally congratulated each single student in front of his/her parent. I do believe enjoy what you are doing and get recognition for your work is the best gift ever and to be able to share it with your family is even better. Thanks Google for celebrating the open source culture. Meet, learn and share I was very impressed by the level of knowledge and abilities of all the 28 students. They are young, enthusiastic and inspiring. Thanks to all the parents for believing and supporting the kids in pursuing their open source journey. Group photo by Jeremy Allison It was wonderful to meet our two FOSSASIA GCI students for the first time. Jason grew up in the States, seemed a bit reserved while Yathannsh from India was very outspoken. They both were very new to open source when they joined the program and now have become active contributors and very eager to learn more. Three of us had a team presentation on FOSSASIA labs and our achievement from GCI 2015. Jason expressed his wish to go on as a mentor for the next GCI. Jason and Yathannsh I had several interesting conversations with the parents who finally understood why their kids were on the computers all the time. About 14% of the parents are working in IT and very aware of open technology. The rest was super excited to learn about various open source projects. Many said to me they would love to have their second son/daughter to join the program as well. The mentor group had a few discussions on pros and cons, how to improve and maximize the outcome of the program, and ways to keep students engaging afterwards. I learned a lot from other orgs and also shared FOSSASIA workflow and guidelines with them. The 7 weeks of GCI was an amazing experience for me and my team. I must give our FOSSASIA mentors credit for their incredible…

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Kids Coding with FOSSASIA and Google Code-In

After the successful Google Summer of Code we are very happy and honored to participate for the second year in Google Code-In. The contest introduces pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development and runs from December 7 2015 until January 25, 2016. Learn more here.Because Google Code-in is often the first experience many students have with open source, the contest is designed to make it easy for students to jump right in. Open source organizations chosen by Google provide a list of tasks for students to work on during the seven week contest period. A unique part of the contest is that each task has mentors from the organization assigned should students have questions or need help along the way.

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TicTacToe Tutorial #FunWithPharo

reposted from jigyasagrover.wordpress.com/tictactoe-tutorial-funwithpharo This tutorial has been included as a chapter in  Fun With Pharo! Tic-tac-toe (or Noughts and crosses, Xs and Os) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three respective marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row wins the game. Because of the simplicity of Tic-tac-toe, it is often used as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship and the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees. It is straightforward to write a computer program to play Tic-tac-toe perfectly, to enumerate the 765 essentially different positions (the state space complexity), or the 26,830 possible games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space. So , here we make a Pharo version of this well-known game by using Morph. This post provides a step-by-step approach on how to go about building this simple application. A game package will be built having 3 subclasses : TicTacToe TicTacToeCell TicTacToeModel Initially , we have created TicTacToe a subclass of the Object class. The subclasses we will make will be combined in the package game as mentioned in the category: parameter. Object subclass: #TicTacToe instanceVariableNames: 'container model' classVariableNames: '' poolDictionaries: '' category: 'game' A category name is not required in order for the class to work, but you will not be able to access the class to make changes or to look at existing code unless you provide a category name. (The category name used can be a new category name or the name of an existing category.) The poolDictionaries: parameter is seldom used and will not be discussed here, and the category: parameter specifies the category under which this class will be grouped in the system browser. As we know, a class encapsulates data values and methods, and every object contains a set of the data values and can receive any of the methods as a message. The data values in each object are specified by providing a set of names of variables whose values will be an object's internal data values. Each object has its own set of these values, and the set of data values for an object represents the object's state (or value). The variables that contain the data values of an object are called the instance variables for the object, and the instanceVariableNames: parameter is a list of names, separated by blanks, for the instance variables. In the above code snippet , we have declared container and model as two instanceVariables. The classVariableNames: parameter lists the identifiers that are the names of variables shared by the class and all of its objects. That is, there is only one set of these, and they are used by the class and all of its objects. Class variables (so called because they belong to the class, of which there is only one, rather than to the objects that are…

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Learn Smalltalk in Online Workshops

During Google Code-In we had several tasks that were aimed at teaching smalltalk to students to they could help with smalltalk projects. Some students were interested to continue learning after Code-In was over, so we started a series of online workshops.The Workshop is made up of a series of live-coding video lectures. Watch the videos, code along, and ask questions on IRC.The best time to ask is saturdays from 2pm to 6pm chinese time, that is 7am to 11am CET or 6am to 10am UTC. You can find eMBee on freenode irc in the channels #fossasia and #pharo.First session: Using the FileSystem class in Pharo SmalltalkSecond session: Serving files through FileSystem in Pharo SmalltalkThird Session: A static webapplication hosted on Pharo Smalltalk

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FOSSASIA joining Google Code-In Program for Students Age 13-17

We are proud to announce that FOSSASIA has been chosen as a mentor organization for Google Code-In 2015. FOSSASIA is one of twelve global organizations participating in the program for students from the 13-17 years old.Google Code-In is a global, online contest for 13-17 year old pre-university students interested in learning more about Open Source development. Students work on bite-sized tasks for real-world open source projects in a variety of categories.Students can register and take over tasks starting from December 1, 2014 and work on tasks until January 19. All tasks are listed on the website at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014Contest TimelineDecember 1, 2014, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: Contest opens for entries by student participantsJanuary 18, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time/ 17:00 UTC: No more tasks can be claimed by students after this timeJanuary 19, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: All work stops, Contest endsJanuary 26, 2015: Mentoring Organizations submit their grand prize winner nominees to Google Open Source Programs OfficeFebruary 2, 2015: Google Open Source Programs Office announces the grand prize winners via blog postJune 2015: Grand Prize trip to Google and northern California Links* Google Code-In http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014* FOSSASIA at Google Code-In http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2014/fossasia

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