Student David Knight selected for Google Summer of Code

May 8, 2008

MIDLAND, Pa. - David Knight, a media arts senior at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, has been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code project.

The Google Summer of Code is an annual program in which Google awards stipends to hundreds of students who successfully help complete a requested free open source software coding project during the summer. This will be its fourth year.

Knight is a son of David and Kathy Knight of Beaver, Pa. He has designed Powerpoint templates and logos. His website designs include those for a master smith and custom knife maker

www.gottschalkknives.com and for the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center www.lppac.org.

Other achievements include earning Eagle Scout status with Boy Scouts of America.

Knight is one of several hundred young programmers from around the world selected to take part in the Summer of Code, founded and sponsored by the Google internet company. Participants who successfully complete their projects receive a $5,000 stipend. Some 900 students successfully participated in 2007.

The goals of Summer of Code are to create more open source code for the benefit of all, to inspire young developers to create more open source code, to bring new developers and backers into open source projects, and to acquaint students with real-world software development issues such as distributive development, software licensing and mailing list etiquette.

Google has chosen 174 open source organizations to participate in the 2008 Google Summer of Code, increased from 136 the year before and 102 in 2006. Each organization was chosen based on criteria such as the virtue of the projects, the ideas given for students to work on, and the ability of the mentors to ensure students successfully completed projects.

The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Google decides how many projects each organization gets, and selects the applications for that organization.