I'm a little confused about which kinds of tasks should be classed as Beginner. The examples listed include "setting up the development environment and providing a screenshot of it" - does this mean I should file that as its own task, and not assume it to be an inherent component of working on tasks related to a particular tool?
Topic on Talk:Google Code-in/Mentors
Alternatively I have a *very* easy task, that won't take 3 days by itself, but could be wrapped into 'set up the development environment, make this small change, and file a pull request', if that was the idea here.
@Samwalton9, beginner tasks are really really easy tasks and can only be done once on GCI. So a task such as "Get on IRC and idle for at least 1 hour" is in theory a beginner task and should be done only once on GCI site. So for most if not all beginner task on GCI, once the student does it, he/she should not do it again.
The reasoning behind this is to avoid students from doing only beginner tasks as the contest is to get student with most number of tasks so it doesn't make sense anymore if a student keeps doing only beginner tasks :)
Also, coming to your task, we try so much so that we do not mark tasks as beginner task because the default number of days on GCI that a task will be completed is 3 days. So maybe you can make the task take a little more time that is, make it a little bit more bony so the student will take say in theory 3 days to work on.
Setting up environment is of course a default for all students working on Wikimedia code bases and we assume they should do this on their own before working on patches. So it's not needed to be a task in this case. Does this answer your question @Samwalton9?
That's helpful, thank you!