Noel King, a graduate from the School of Computing in conjunction with Google has become involved in a non-profit program called Coder Dojo. Centres have been set up in Dublin, Cork and Limerick to teach children how to program from the age of 6. It is an all year round program which runs every Saturday from 11 to 5 in Google HQ on Barrow Street and it is open to all children with no barriers to entry i.e. they don't charge anything and don't require kids to bring laptops. Some really strong developers from Ireland and Multinational companies are there teaching the skills.
Noel said "I believe if we can teach over 100 children a year programming skills it should lead to a increase in IT related courses, stronger undergraduates entering university and thus providing better candidates to companies in the medium term. We started last week in Google's HQ with HTML and are planning to teach them HTML, Web Development, C, Objective C and Java. I am very excited by this program and really feel it has the potential to lay a strong foundation to encourage IT talent at a young age in this country".
If you are interested in helping out or if you know any parent or child who has a passion for computing and want to learn more, the progam's website is:
