Mayo students are national EU Hackathon winners

THREE students from Mount Saint Michael Secondary School in Claremorris (The Chain Gang) have beaten opposition from all over Ireland to become champions in the national EU Code Week Hackathon 2021.

In a remarkable outcome, the team that placed third in the competition was also from Mount Saint Michael - The Dream Team, comprising Aoife Hughes, 5th year, Amy Gaughan, Sarah Keady, Katie Monahan and Doireann Byrne, all 6th year.

EU Code Week (#CodeWeek) is a grassroots movement run by volunteers to promote digital literacy through activities linked to coding and computer science. It inspires and engages people to explore new ideas and innovation for the future. Activities for EU Code Week take place all over the world in October.

The idea of the EU Code Week Hackathon is to show how concrete solutions come to life with the help of young people’s creativity, enthusiasm, fresh ideas and coding skills. The hackathons are created and co-organised by the European Commission and local EU Code Week Ambassadors. The initiative is financed by the European Parliament.

The Hackathon began with a challenge to develop a code that solves a real-life challenge in just 24 hours (The Hack). The five most successful teams then received training and mentoring from experts in this field, to prepare them for the second and final round, from which ultimate winner was selected.

Winning team The Chain Gang (Aoibheann Mangan, Anna Farragher and Theres Devassy) will receive prize money for the school and themselves up to €2,000.

They have also secured a spot at the European final where all the hackathon winners will present their ideas to a European jury during the official EU Code Week in October. The European champion will, besides the glory, win additional IT equipment.