Success at Coolest Projects Awards for young coders from CoderDojo DCU

22/06/2016

A budget laser-cutting machine made from recycled CD parts; a personal safety tracker on your phone; an app to help journalists and interviewees do interviews when in different time zones.

These projects developed by young coders at CoderDojo DCU won awards on Saturday at the annual Coolest Projects showcase in Dublin.

Now in its fifth year, the Coolest Projects showcase drew crowds of more than 10,000 visitors to the RDS, where hundreds of young people demonstrated apps, websites, games and robots they made using skills learned at CoderDojo, a community of volunteer-run computer clubs for people aged 7 to 17.

Thomas Carrigan, 17, attends CoderDojo at DCU and won the Intel Hardware prizes and Runner Up in the Hardware section for a creation he made from recycled CD parts.

“I wanted to try to make a computer-controlled laser cutter as cheaply as possible, so I salvaged some components from CD drives to make the X and Y axis and I used some cheap wood to make a frame,” he explained. “I then wired up the stepper motors from the drive trays to a Genuino 101 and wrote some code so that I could control it on my Phone via Bluetooth.”

There was a last-minute panic when a component needed to be switched, but everything was back working just in time for the judges to view the project, recalled Carrigan. “It was a bit challenging, but it all worked out in the end.”

14-year-old Jake O’Toole from CoderDojo DCU showcased his PinPoint mobile phone app at Coolest Projects. “It’s a personal safety app that will display your current location to a list of trusted contacts, so they know exactly where you are if you are feeling unsafe,” he explained. “They can see you live and if you move off your pre-set route or stop for too long, they will know.”

O’Toole, whose own experience of walking home on dark winter evenings inspired him to make the tracker, won Runner Up in the App category at Coolest Projects, as did 13-year-old Niamh Scanlon from CoderDojo DCU. She built Auto-Journalist, an app to help journalists and interviewees to conduct interviews even when they can’t talk in real time.

“The app lets the journalist send questions to the interviewee, who can then record answers using the video or microphone on their device,” said Scanlon, who is EU Digital Girl of the Year. “When the journalist gets those recordings back, they can use that content content for their story.”

A trio of young coders still in primary school – Ellie McDonnell, Naoise Koppel and Emer Morgan from CoderDojo DCU – won Runner Up in the Games section for their ‘Fruit Mania’ game where the player needs to catch fruit in a bowl and put skins into the bin.

Coolest Projects co-founder and CoderDojo DCU mentor Noel King said that the entire mentor team at DCU is extremely proud of the 48 projects that were registered from the DCU Dojo.

“Taking part in CoderDojo and creating a real project from that learning is a really valuable experience, and the creativity we have seen from these young coders is amazing,” he said. “Well done to everyone who attended CoderDojo DCU this year and we will be back in September with new courses and even more exciting content to learn.”

DCU President Professor Brian MacCraith said that Coolest Projects promotes learning by doing and expressed his gratitude to the volunteers and mentors who run the busy CoderDojo at DCU each week.

"It's heartening see that the DCU CoderDojo provided so many winning entries at Coolest Projects 2016. DCU has supported the CoderDojo concept from its earliest days and is delighted to host three busy coding sessions every Saturday,” said Professor MacCraith. “I have watched the excitement grow week on week as these creative young coders developed their concepts through to the impressive working models that they exhibited at the Coolest Projects event."