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about 18 hours ago

How to Plan your Project

Hi there,

Your Starter Kit has the requirements, the tracks, and what to submit. This one's about something else: how to pace four weeks so you actually finish.

📅 Give yourself a schedule
A little planning goes a long way. Here's a rough timeline that leaves room for the parts people underestimate:

  • ⛈️ Brainstorm — this week

  • 💡 Pick your idea and your track — by Aug 7

  • 📐 Sketch your architecture — by Aug 10 (yes, before you build; it's a required submission item anyway, and drawing it early surfaces the gaps)

  • 🧰 Start building — Aug 10

  • ✍️ Open your submission form — week of Aug 17, so nothing catches you cold

  • 🚀 Finish the build — by Aug 24

  • 📹 Record your demo video — Aug 25–26

  • ✅ Submit — by Aug 28. Submit a week early and our review team will try to check your entry for baseline eligibility in advance, and message you if anything needs fixing.

  • ⭐ Keep polishing — you can edit as many times as you like until Aug 31 at 5:00 PM PT

🦅 One warning from experience: video uploads can take much longer than expected. Give yourself a buffer.

 
💡 Pick a problem worth solving

The strongest projects start from a real, specific annoyance rather than a clever technical idea. Find a messy, multi-step chore in your job, your classes, or your personal life — the kind of thing you do every week and resent. Then build the agent that handles it end to end.

That framing does double duty: it makes your demo obviously valuable, and it keeps you from building a chatbot by accident. Judges reward agents that take action, not agents that talk well.

Want more on planning? Tips for Planning Your Project.

 

🎓 Workshops start next week

Google's running four live, hands-on sessions through the submission period, each offered twice so you can catch one in your time zone:

  • Aug 11 — Architecting Multi-Agent Teams: going from a single agent to a multi-agent system, and knowing which of the three ADK orchestration patterns to reach for. (8:30 AM or 9:00 PM PT)

  • Aug 13 — Build a Long-Running Agent: persistent workflows with ADK — crash recovery, human approval, and the idempotency trap.

  • Aug 20 — Build a Self-Evolving Agent: autonomous self-improvement, and how to catch it gaming the metric.

  • Aug 27 — Architecting Agent Memory: session state, vector search, and managed cloud memory.

Sign-up links are coming soon — check the Webinars section of the Resources tab later this week. Every session is recorded and posted there afterward.

 

⚡ One thing to do today

If you haven't requested your $150 in Google Cloud credits yet, do it now (link on the Resources tab). Reviews take up to 72 business hours, and the form closes August 28 at 12:00 PM PT. It's the one item on your list with a queue in front of it.

 

We can't wait to see what you build.