Irish team selected for Programming Olympics

The team to represent Ireland at the 28th International high-school Programming Olympiad in Russia this August has been chosen following a three-day intensive programming boot-camp at Dublin City University.

Eoin Davey from Summerhill, Sligo; Teofil Camarasu, Dundalk Grammar School, Louth; John Ryan, St Joseph’s College, Thurles, Tipperary and Kieran Horgan, Davis College, Mallow, Co. Cork will represent Ireland in the upcoming event. The top eight programming students in Ireland attended the final selection session at DCU from Monday, June 27th to Wednesday, June 29th with the final four chosen by a panel of programming experts from the AIPO (All Ireland Programming Olympiad committee).

Gary Conway, Programme Manager of the AIPO, DCU School of Computing said: “The upcoming Programming Olympics is an exciting and hugely challenging event. Ireland will pit their wits against the best young minds in the world, competing with programming super-powers such as China, the US and of course the host nation Russia. We are sending our top programming students to this competition, after making the selection from a very high quality field. The competition is all about problem solving and computational thinking, all under intense pressure and all vital skills for the world of software programming and the ICT sector.”

The Irish team are sponsored by Fidelity Investments who have been supporting the Irish participation in the Programming Olympiad for the past five years.

Tadhg O’Shea, Vice President of Software Engineering, said:

“Fidelity Investments Ireland takes great pride in our continued sponsorship of this event, which brings together some of the brightest and youngest problem-solvers and computational thinkers in Ireland. The programme is a great way of supporting these students to develop their technical skills further, and encouraging them to consider a future career in IT.”

The team will now travel to Russia for the International Olympiad in Informatics from Friday August 12th to Friday August 19th competing with 82 countries for the title of International Olympiad Champion.

The International Olympiad in Informatics is a yearly IT competition for second level students. The first event took place in 1989. The aim of the International Olympiad is to promote an interest in IT among students and to develop IT on the school curriculum.