AIPO 2017 Senior Winners - (L-R) 3rd - Oisín O'Duibhir, Scoil Mhuire Agus Íde, Limerick; 1st - John Ryan, St. Josephs College, Thules; 2nd - Kieran Horgan, Davis College Mallow
The cream of BT Young Scientists and CoderDojo took up the challenge of the National Programming Olympiad (AIPO) competition at DCU during the mid-term break (25/2/17). Sponsored by Fidelity Investments Ireland, 33 students from around Ireland flexed their coding muscles in one of the tough competitions in the country for second level students. After qualifying through an online preliminary round, the students had to code solutions for 8 algorithmic puzzles to be crowned 2017 National AIPO Champion.
2017 BT Young Scientist Technology category winner and budding Data Scientist John Ryan (17) from St. Joseph’s College, Borrisoleigh, Thurles clinched his first Senior title with a score of 425 from a possible maximum of 600. He was closely followed in 2nd place by his 2016 Team Ireland comrade, CoderDojo Mallow’s Kieran Horgan (16) with a score of 370 points. Newcomer Oisín O’Duibhir (16) took the bronze medal with a score of 360 points. The Junior top prize went to Suneet Mahajan (14) who was competing with our youngest competitor, his sister, Ayushi (11), both from Douglas, Cork.
All of the talented youngsters at the National Finals are self taught to the level of a 2nd year University student. This shows their passion and dedication to coding, technology and self-learning. A remarkable accolade!
The most recent 
CPSSD 2nd years, Noah Donnelly and Cian Ruane, came out on top of 53 University teams from around Ireland at this year’s Google HashCode competition held in the School of Computing last thursday evening (23/2/17). What’s more amazing is that their webform crushing team (name) 
Dr. Paraic Sheridan, Associate Director in ADAPT, was amoung the honoured at the Inaugural DCU Alumni Awards held in the Helix last Friday night, 17th February 2017.