There's still time to enter the Google Apps Developer Challenge 2012, which is accepting first round submissions until August 24th. It's worth a look as the field is wide open, the prizes are large and App Script is worth learning.

This contest, which is open to teams and individuals around the globe (see the rules for restrictions) asks you to:
find new and innovative ways to use Apps Script, Apps and Drive APIs to build cool apps.

These APIs are available in a variety of languages including Java, PHP, Python and .NET.  The simplest and way of creating a Google app is to use App Script, which is a JavaScript clone plus lots of additional objects that allow you to work with most of the Google products such as Docs, Gmail, Maps and so on. The biggest problem is that the range of APIs available is so large that it is difficult to choose where to start.

There are three categories:

• Enterprise / Small Business Solutions (e.g.Accounting, Sales, Workflow, Collaboration)
  
  
• Social / Personal Productivity / Games / Fun
  
  
• Education / Not for Profit / Water / Food & Hunger / Health

and five regions:

• India
• South East Asia
• Sub Saharan Africa
• Latin America
• Middle East and North Africa
• Europe, North America and rest of world

and  prizes of $20,000 will be awarded to the winners of each category in each region. If any team from a university wins one of these prizes a further amount of $18,000 will be awarded to be shared among the university departments they come from.

To win any of the major prizes involves being selected as a semi-finalist and up to ten entries per category in each region that receive the highest overall scores in Round One will be selected. All semi finalists will be awarded a Chromebook and any semi-finalist individual or team composed solely of women or of university students will be awarded $1,000.

There are already lots of resources to help you with these APIs on Google Developers and I Programmer has Getting Started with Google App Scripts for beginners to this useful framework