*Tom Dandoy is presented with his award. Photograph: Liam Burke / Press 22
A KILMALEY student has been crowned the overall winner of the thirteenth annual National Scratch Coding Competition.
Tom Dandoy, a student at CBS Ennistymon won the top prize at the coding competition which is organised by Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and the Irish Computer Society.
Top-scoring teams from schools and clubs across the country with participants aged six years and older demonstrating their Scratch projects to judges at the University of Limerick. Among the themes of this year’s entries were healthy eating, social inclusion, recycling and poetry.
There were 280 entries in this year’s competition, a big increase on last year with a gender balance of 56% male and 44% female. Forty-five students made it to the finals and the panel of 15 judges was very impressed by the quality and originality of the projects on show.
Scratch is a visual programming language that helps children to build key coding skills in a fun and interactive way. The Scratch Coding Competition promotes computing and software development at both primary and secondary school levels and has grown since 2010 alongside the growth in interest in coding.
A senior student at CBS Ennistymon, Tom designed and built the computer game ‘Spaceship Battles 3’ using Scratch, he also composed the score. He has attended the North Clare school for the past five years, his parents hail from Belgium.
Dr Clare McInerney, Education and Public Engagement Manager with Lero said, “Lero’s support and involvement in the Scratch competition underpins one of our core objectives which is to train software practitioners of the future through interventions at all levels of the education system. It is so important to nurture and develop coding skills and computational thinking among children and young people. What we see in the National Scratch Competition Finals is the culmination of many months of work for the participants, their teachers and their families and the end result is very impressive. Their projects are a convergence of science and creativity and allows them to see what coding makes possible”.
Mary Cleary, Secretary General of the Irish Computer Society commented, “The National Scratch Competition gives young people a chance to show both their creative and critical thinking, as well as their innovation. Technology can be immensely valuable and hold a lot of potential if you learn how to use it and Scratch shows that power in a fun and engaging way. I hope that some of the young people in the finals today will go on to become tomorrow’s IT professionals, but even if they choose a different path, I hope their experience in this competition will help them as they become digital citizens”.
