It’s nearly that time of year again as dozens of kids turned up to the CHQ building in George’s Dock, Dublin, to launch this year’s CoderDojo Coolest Projects Awards with a drone showcase.
With the event itself taking place on 13 June in the RDS, young coders from Ireland and around the world will fly in for the event to showcase their IT skills across a whole range of incredible applications including apps, games, websites, robots and ‘hacks’, all with the intentions of making our lives run better.
Coolest Projects has seen enormous growth from just 15 entries in 2011 to an anticipated 500 entries this year, with coders attending the event from all over Ireland, from the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and more expected from other EU member states.
Previous winners of Coolest Projects include 10-year old Lauren Boyle who is currently EU Digital Girl of the year and soon to be a keynote speaker at Inspirefest 2015, Thomas Carrigan (Robot creator), and 12-year old Niamh Scanlon, who last year built an app to allow users of electric cars find free charging points and see whether or not they are currently available.
Creating a cool monster
The competition this year will no-doubt be fierce with the inevitably of a number of high-quality projects and the judges will be looking to be find those few coders and their projects which really stand out from the crowd.
At the launch itself in Dublin on 31 March, those who attended were able to witness a drone spectacular, programmed by CoderDojo students there, to perform a whole range of flips and impressive manoeuvres offering a glimpse of their skills.
Paul Phelan, operations director corporate affairs group EMEA at Intel Ireland and co-founder of Coolest Projects, said of this year’s edition, “We have created a monster … a really cool monster that is growing at a phenomenal rate and I know that in not too many years, we will look back at how this cool monster has created skills and innovation that has created investment and employment in Ireland.”
Adding similar sentiment, Noel King, Coolest Projects leader and Champion at CoderDojo Dublin City University (DCU), said, “Coolest Projects was founded to enable a generation of tech creators and inventors, and what these young members have created has been extraordinary.”
“Seeing 12-year olds creating enterprise-grade projects highlights the amazing potential we have in this country if we embrace, support and encourage this generation.”
