Google funded 400 student projects during the 2005 Summer of Code. In 2006, the number of funded projects rose to over 600. For the 2007 Summer of Code, Google accepted over 900 student applicants from a pool of nearly 6,200 applications.

The goals of this program include:

• Getting more open source code created and released for the benefit of all;
• Inspiring young developers to begin participating in open source development;
• Helping open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers;
• Providing students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer;
• Giving students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios.

While the majority of past student participants were enrolled in university Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs, participants now come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds. These range from computational biology to mining engineering.

Many of the past participants had never participated in an open source project before the Google Summer of Code. Others used the Google Summer of Code stipend as an opportunity to concentrate fully on their existing open source coding activities over the summer. Several of the 2005 students went on to become mentors in the 2006 program.

The student proposals are matched with mentors. Among other things, mentor organizations are supposed to rank the proposals and provide mid-term evaluations of student progress as well as a final evaluation of student progress at the end of the program.