There are a number of interesting projects being undertaken in this years Google Summer of Code.

If you know of any students that might be interested then perhaps point them to the Open Chemistry Project.

The Open Chemistry project is a collection of open source, cross platform libraries and applications for the exploration, analysis and generation of chemical data. The organization is an umbrella of leading projects developed by long-time collaborators and innovators in open chemistry such as the Avogadro, Open Babel, and cclib projects. These three alone have been downloaded over 700,000 times and cited in over 2,000 academic papers. Our goal is to improve the state of the art, and facilitate the open exchange of chemical data and ideas while utilizing the best technologies from quantum chemistry codes, molecular dynamics, informatics, analytics, and visualization.

There is a list of the GSoC Ideas 2018 here but of course students can add their own.