Google Call to Code competition winners announced

Google has announced the winners of the ‘Call to Code’ competition for post primary schools. Over 1500 students were registered this year by more than 400 teachers to represent their school with a healthy 46:54 female to male ratio. 70% of participation came from outside of Dublin showing a growing interest among students in computer science and coding across Ireland.

The overall winner of the junior cycle group was Caolan Fleming aged 14, from St. Marys CBS Portlaoise and the winner of the senior cycle group was Nebojsa Cvetkovic, aged 18, from The High School, Rathgar. They both received a brand new Chromebook.

The final round of the competition was held at Google’s EMEA Headquarters in Dublin where 40 of Ireland’s brightest and best young computer scientists – 20 junior and 20 senior cycle students – took part in the live final and battled it out to answer coding challenges and solve logic puzzles.

Prizes were also awarded to two teachers for their role in promoting computer science among their students – Ms. Kate Leahy from Árdscoil na Trionóide, Athy, Co. Kildare had the most competing students in the Senior and Ms. Maeve Cormican from Carrick-on-Shannon Community School, Co. Leitrim had the highest number of competing students in the Junior category. Each received a Chromebook as well as a Chromebook computer lab for their school.

Commenting on the winners Niall Murphy, Google Engineering, said, “Congratulations to Caolan and Nebojsa on their achievement today and also to Maeve and Kate, as we know teachers play a vital role in computer science education. Over 400 teachers registered their students from 300 schools across Ireland to take part in Call to Code 2015, which shows that competitions like this can help to incentivise participation and help teachers to encourage students to study computer science.”

Google invited students from every post primary school in Ireland to register on the competition website www.calltocode.ie to take part in the first round of the competition online on November 25th. From this round of the competition 40 students qualified to take part in the final round at Google EMEA HQ.

All 40 finalists received a certificate of commendation and the second and third place finalists also received Google Play store credit, with the two overall winners each receiving a Chromebook.