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CORVALLIS, Ore. - High school students can soon participate in the Google Code-in Contest with the assistance of the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University.

In this contest, which begins Nov. 22, students aged 13-18 will be provided with a list of tasks that could improve various open source software projects. The OSU Open Source Lab, one of 20 organizations participating in this initiative, will ask students to create logo artwork, write code, produce documentation, fix software glitches and do other tasks.

Students do not need to have prior programming experience to complete many of the contest tasks.

"We are excited to participate in the Google Code-in contest," said Jeff Sheltren, operations manager for the OSU Open Source Lab. "We've mentored university students in open source development for the past five years in Google's Summer of Code program and had great success. We look forward to helping high school students engage with open source software projects and communities."

This project is one of several K-12 educational initiatives the lab participates in, including the Oregon Virtual School District and the TeachEngineering Project.

In the Google Code-in Contest, successful participants will receive a T-shirt from Google and have the opportunity to win up to $500 for their submissions. Full details are available online at http://google-melange.com To stay up to date on working with the Oregon State University Open Source Lab for the Google Code-in contest, people may visit http://osuosl.org/gci or follow @osuosl on Twitter.