End of term

[Andrew Pegum]

We finished out the third block of sessions with something different, a Scratch coding challenge. Everyone had 45 minutes to code, from scratch, a countdown timer, counting down from 10s to zero. It had to do that and it had to work but you could make it look and work any way you liked – the challenge was to build something cool. At the end, the mentors went around and scored the programs but, more importantly, all the Dojo members gave votes to their favourites and the votes from both were combined.

We got some very good entries and the winners in the different categories were:

Group 1: Sean Healy
Group 2: Sophia Beitzel
Group 3: Conor Brennan
Best name: Keelan Daye
Funniest program: Ronan Greene
Shortest program: Eric Kilmartin (4 lines!)
Best visuals: Ruairi Greene
Cleverest approach: Katie Olden

Well done to all the winners and everyone who created entries. We hope to do more coding challenges, in Scratch or other languages, in the future, we hope you had fun!. Maybe some team challenges next time!

Some of programs were quite similar, this first time, so keep it in mind for next time: all the group winners had something different and unique going on so…. the winning strategy is to do something really creative and original, to hoover up the votes!

Stay tuned to the website/group email list over the summer – we may have some one-off events, on different subjects – but we’ll hopefully be back properly in September.

Till then, keep coding – we’ll love to see what you built over summer.

Thanks for coming, from all in CoderDojo Dun Laoghaire!

(And special thanks from us to Sandra for making it all possible.)