Google Code In 2018 Lessons Learned

(see the 2017 lessons learned page)

Purpose

This is to document things that admins and mentors learned, for the benefit of future Code-In exercises.

Spam on the IRC channel

In 2018, we had some issues with one or two students spamming the IRC channel. The policies of the channels might need to be reviewed. Additionally, ensure that there are moderators in covering the majority of the time zones.

Limit the number of design tasks

The number of design tasks should be limited to ensure that students do not exclusively complete design tasks.

Possible task to teach the students about plagiarism

At the GSoC summit, there was a lot of discussion on students that cheat. The consensus was that do not always understand what plagiarism is. The suggestion to deal with this is to possibly develop a beginner task that introduce them to the concept. For example, this test was developed for university students.