At Accenture Ireland’s International Women’s Day event, we caught up with 17-year-old Catrina Carrigan, who made headlines last year when her CoderDojo Coolest Project submission was picked up by UK company e-Skills to teach computing at GCSE level.
Carrigan is still a member of CoderDojo DCU and mentors CoderDojo Girls at the Dublin university. Before she joined, though, she had no interest in technology and believed learning to code would be too difficult.
A few months after attending her first dojo, Carrigan devised an idea for the Coolest Project Awards and started to develop it. Her Piano Rock Star website, which teaches users how to play the piano, guitar and drums, became the inspiration behind an e-Skills project to make computer programming fun and accessible for IT teachers and students.
Carrigan’s idea has since been developed by Intel and CoderDojo to become part of Behind the Screen, an employer-led initiative to equip GCSE computing students with the right technical and soft skills they will need.
Women Invent Tomorrow is Silicon Republic’s campaign to champion the role of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. It has been running since March 2013, and is kindly supported by Accenture Ireland, Intel, the Irish Research Council, ESB, CoderDojo and Science Foundation Ireland. You can nominate inspiring women in the fields of STEM via email to womeninvent@siliconrepublic.com or on Twitter to @siliconrepublic.
