The Mentor's Guide to Google Code-In!

Basic Introduction to Interface:

• On the dashboard, you can view the number of assigned tasks that have been assigned to you.

• If you are interested in mentoring a certain task, you can assign it to yourself on the task page.

  

• Draft Tasks: The tasks which have been created but are yet to be finally published by the organization admin. Draft tasks are not visible to the student until they are published by an organization admin.

• Assigned Tasks: The tasks which you have assigned yourself to mentor for the contest.

The tasks page:

• You can view all the tasks that have been assigned to you.

• If you want to see all other tasks that have been created in the organization, you can toggle off the “My tasks” toggle.

Creating a task:

You can have a look at example tasks by Google and JBoss 2018 GCI tasks for inspiration.

However, to remind you, here are some key points to keep in mind while creating tasks:

• Title Format:

  • [Project Name]: Task requirement in brief.

• Description Format:

  • If it is a new framework/technology, a 2-3 line paragraph about it, in the beginning, should suffice.

  • A brief idea about what the student is required to do (in pointers or paragraph).

  • Ideal steps that a student should follow to complete that task (pointers are a must in this).

  • Task requirements from the student:

    • Screenshots (if any)

    • Link to the pull request.

    • Github link for the project

    • Github issue link for the task

  • Additional Sources

    • Add sources like the link to the project’s documentation or any other website that can help the student in learning about it.

• Instance count:

  • Ideally, if it is purely a beginner task and not related specifically to any project, keep the instance count to about 100.
  • In all other cases, the instance count depends on the task. If the task is about adding a particular feature in a project, the ideal count would be 3 - 4 and then we can merge the best of those PRs (Best here meaning, the one which got submitted first and with good quality of code).

• Time to complete:

  • The range that can be set: 3 to 7 days

  • Again, this will depend on the task, please try not to make tasks which would require 5+ days of work from the student, this would just end up in saturating the student. We can also extend the deadline of a task later if a student asks for it.

  • Categories and Tags:

    • Please ensure that you use proper categories, this helps in optimizing the search results for the students. The same goes for tags. Example of tags: “android” “Kubernetes” “java” “testing” “API” etc.

• Do not include a lot of things in just one task, rather, it is recommended to divide it into smaller subtasks.

Responsibilities as a mentor

• First of all, you need to understand that the participating students are minors and their privacy has to be respected.

• Do not create any tasks that could even minutely supply any kind of personal information like their pictures, social networking handles.

• It goes without saying that we cannot expect the students to understand the tasks in just one trial.

• Give constructive feedback, be patient, and be respectful to the students.

• Communicate with the student, respond to questions and comments within 12 hours.
  If a student asks for help in IRC, please make sure to help them as soon as you can or direct them to your colleague who would be best suited to help.

• Encourage the students to ask questions, preferably on GCI Dashboard or on the Gitter chatroom.

• Wait for all instances to get completed before merging a PR.

• If you find a case of plagiarism of any means. Handle the situation calmly, do not contact the student directly regarding this and report it in the mentor’s chat group on Telegram or directly the organization admin as soon as you can.