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Mountain View High student wins Google open source contest
First prize: a trip to Mountain View

by Casey Weiss

As the winners of Google's open source contest, 10 high school students and their parents were flown to the company's Mountain View headquarters last week to receive their prizes. While some contestants traveled from as far as South Africa and Poland, the trip was not too demanding for Jonathan Wilde, a student at Mountain View High School.

Google started its "Highly Open Participation Contest" this year to encourage high school students to learn more about open source software, which is free software available for anyone to download, use and develop. Each student was paired with a mentor and assigned a task.

Wilde, a Los Altos Hills resident and entering sophomore at Mountain View High, worked with Plone, an open source Web site which allows people "to publish new Web pages without any coding experience or expensive Web design tools like Adobe Dreamweaver," he said.

Wilde wrote four "themes" designed to let users work on their Web sites by copying files. Last Friday, he joined the nine other winners — who had beaten out hundreds of high school students from around the world — in a tour of the Google campus, complete with lunch and an award presentation by Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice president of engineering.

"It is nice to look at your faces, and see the future of Google through your eyes," Eustace told the winners. "There are not as many people going into computer science given the impact we can make."

While Google has run a similar contest for college students for the last three years, company employees said they wanted younger students to have opportunities to explore technology, math and engineering.

"We would like to engage students of a younger age," said Leslie Hawthorn, a program manager at Google who organized the contest. "It blew away our wildest expectation."

E-mail Casey Weiss at cweiss@mv-voice.com

Posted by r00m23, a resident of another community, on Sep 8, 2008 at 8:58 pm

as seen on Jay Leno

Posted by Bobby M, a resident of another community, on Sep 8, 2008 at 11:57 pm

Just saw this article on Jay Leno ... hilarious !! "Mountain View High student wins Google open source contest

First prize: a trip to Mountain View"

Posted by Don Frances, Mountain View Voice Editor, on Sep 9, 2008 at 10:17 am
Don Frances is a member (registered user) of Mountain View Online

Can someone tell us which night Jay Leno talked about this? I've seen him do that sketch before, where he holds up funny articles from around the country. What paper was it?

Posted by Dave, a resident of the Old Mountain View neighborhood, on Sep 9, 2008 at 9:18 pm

It was last night (Monday 9/8)

Posted by Dave, a resident of the Old Mountain View neighborhood, on Sep 9, 2008 at 9:19 pm

And it was the article in the Mountain View Voice :-)

Posted by Dave, a resident of the Old Mountain View neighborhood, on Sep 9, 2008 at 9:27 pm

And the show is here:

Web Link