New video shows how 12-year-old’s love of coding overcame bullying
Kathleen Marie Maughan

New video shows how 12-year-old’s love of coding overcame bullying

11 Mar 2015

Despite never using a computer until as recently as two years ago, 12-year-old Kathleen Marie of Clondalkin, Co Dublin, is the star of a new video showing how she used coding to overcome bullying.

From the age of 10, Kathleen Marie began visiting CoderDojo after being encouraged by her parents and grandmother and in the space of two years has established herself as one of the brightest coders in her CoderDojo class in the Deansrath Centre.

Now, in a video put together by Athena Media, she talks about how despite her happiness now, before she went to CoderDojo she experienced a significant amount of bullying because she is from the travelling community which, as she says, made her feel “really sad and angry”.

Spending much of her current time working on HTML, Kathleen Marie’s first success story was after she used her experiences of being bullied in a positive way by creating an anti-bullying quiz app.

Not long after, her level of skill was widely praised, so much so that she was awarded second prize in a competition among 257 other students, and was lucky enough to win a trip to Brussels to show her app to the European parliament.

Well done, Kathleen Marie, that’s some achievement!

Women Invent is Silicon Republic’s campaign to champion the role of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. It has been running since March 2013, and is kindly supported by Accenture Ireland, Intel, the Irish Research Council, ESB, Twitter, CoderDojo and Science Foundation Ireland.

Inspire 2015 is Silicon Republic’s unique international sci-tech event running 18-19 June in Dublin, connecting professionals passionate about the future of STEM with fresh perspectives on leadership, innovation and diversity. Buy your early bird tickets now Get in early and grab the ‘Two-for-one’ tickets before the end of March. You don’t want to miss this!

Colm Gorey
By Colm Gorey

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic. He joined in January 2014 and covered AI, IoT, science and anything that will get us to Mars quicker. When not trying to get his hands on the latest gaming release, he can be found lost in a sea of Wikipedia articles on obscure historic battles and countries that don't exist any more, or watching classic Simpsons episodes far too many times to count.

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