BeagleBoard.org Foundation has 7 students participating in Google Summer of Code 2016:

Gain extra serial interfaces without wasting valuable CPU cycles in bitabanging.

• Student: Vaibhav Choudhary
• Mentors: Andrew Bradford, Matt Porter
• Source Code
• Wiki

Help the BeagleBone community to write applications based on SPI much more easily

• Student: Patryk Mężydło
• Mentors: Michael Welling, Andrew Bradford, Matt Porter
• Source Code
• Wiki
• Blog

Utilize the two PRUs [..] and their low latency architecture to get a fast, generic, parallel analog converter interface

• Student: Zubeen Tolani
• Mentors: SJLC, Abhishek Kumar, Michael Welling, Hunyue Yau
• Source Code
• Wiki
• Blog
• Slides [PDF]

port the soundcard drivers to the BeagleBoard-X15 and create an user-space library to make use of DSPs

• Student: Henrik Langer
• Mentors: Robert Manzke, Vladimir Pantelic
• Code: GSoC-2016 & beagle-linux
• Wiki
• Blog

Create easy-to-use APIs for the hardware on the BeagleBone Blue

• Student: Kiran Kumar Lekkala
• Mentors: Alex Hiam, Micheal Welling, Kumar Abhishek, Deepak Karki
• Code: bb_blue_api
• Wiki
• Blog

Be friendly to novice developers, allowing them to [..] write Python code beside Javascript

• Student: Amr Ragaey
• Mentors: Jason Kridner, Alex Hiam
• Code: bone101

Create a sonic anemometer for small, inexpensive weather stations

• Student: Visaoni
• Mentors: nerdboy, Alex Hiam, Hunyue Yau