Oundle exchange pupil wins grand prize in Google Code-in contest

Published on isbi School News dated Monday 12th of May 2014

Dalimil Hajek, an exchange student from Gymn�zium Jana Keplera in the Czech Republic, has been awarded a grand prize in the Google Code-in contest designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development.

The competition ran from November 2013 to January 2014, while Dalimil was attending Oundle School on an exchange programme from his home school.
Dalimil commented, 'I didn't write code for Google itself, Google organized the competition and recruited open source organizations for which students wrote their code. I chose Apertium an open source organization which is trying to do machine translation in a more intelligent way than Google Translate - focuses on less often used languages. I wrote many scripts in Python, wiki scrapers, sentence structure analysis and other programming tasks which were quite challenging and required a few hours of intense concentration.'

337 teenagers from 46 countries competed, writing code, fixing bugs, creating documentation and finding creative ways to get other students interested in participating in open source. Each of the 10 open source organizations that worked with students during the contest chose two students to be their organization's grand prize winners based on the students' comprehensive body of work. Dalimil along with the 19 other prize winners from around the world recently enjoyed a 4 night trip to Google's headquarters in California.

Dalimil added, 'We saw Google's headquarters and heard several speakers talking about self-driving cars, Chrome OS, Google Maps and similar Google stuff.'

Head of Computing at Oundle School, Rob Cunniffe commented, 'I am was extremely impressed with Dalimil's computing ability during his time at Oundle. The complexity of the tasks that he solved as part of the Google Code-in was highly impressive, and required excellent programming skills as well as a highly developed understanding of the English and Slovak languages.'

Dalimil is in the process of applying to Oxford University where he is hoping to study Computer Science.