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SciFest@Stratford - first time in Ireland Scratch programming projects featured

SciFest4Stem Tweets live from SciFest@Stratford Photos and tweets: Sheila Porter, CEO SciFest
NEWS / 30 April 2014

On Tuesday, 29th April, Stratford College hosted its first-ever SciFest@Stratford. A SciFest is like a mini 'Young Scientist' competition but held in the school itself. Lots of students can enter a SciFest and the rest of the school gets to see their work too. External SciFest judges visit the school to choose the prizewinners.

On Tuesday, 29th April, Stratford College hosted its first ever SciFest@Stratford. A SciFest is like a mini 'Young Scientist' competition but held in the school itself. Lots of students can enter a SciFest and the rest of the school gets to see their work too. External SciFest judges visit the school to choose the prizewinners. Photos of the judging were tweeted in realtime to SciFest4stem twitter account. For more photos see 2013-2014 Gallery.

The TY students exhibited their Scratch programming projects to three SciFest@Schools judges and to the whole school. Not only was it a first for Stratford but it was also the first SciFest@Schools to feature Scratch programming projects in Ireland! Thank you to the judges, Sheila Porter, CEO of SciFest; Brian Gillespie, Lecturer in the School of Computing, DIT and Dee Slattery, Lecturer in Scratch and other technologies, Blackrock Education Centre. The judges were really impressed by all the programming work done by the students. Everyone who participated on the day received a SciFest certificate. Well done to all the prizewinners! Andrew and Rory were placed 1st, Svetlana and Jessica were placed 2nd while Kate and Nicole were placed joint-3rd.  SciFest@Stratford was arranged by Mr. Desmond and Ms. O'Kelly.

Leanna Morgan writes about her experience of the competition:

"On the 29th of April judges came to our school to judge us on our computer programming. For the past few months we have been working on games/stories and walk-throughs in a class called Scratch. I found it a very interesting experience as we got judged by people outside our school on work. I found that it was very educational and taught us several life skills.

I believe that people in TY have a really good future in computer programming and I believe that they would be really good at it. I myself don't think I would have a good career in computer programming as I feel mine would not be successful as I can't programme as I find it very difficult. I believed that it was a very challenging task."

See Awards and Achievements page.

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