Call to Code
Katie McHugh and Ciara Gorman with Google’s Fionnaula Meehan. Image via Conor McCabe photography

Google launches Call to Code 2015 for Irish teens

21 Sep 2015

The second iteration of Google’s Call to Code competition has been announced for this year with entries to come from Ireland’s secondary schools.

In its inaugural event last year, Google saw more than 2,500 students take part to help increase the interest in coding among Irish students aged between 13 and 18.

The event, which will begin on 25 November this year, will be split into two different rounds.

During the first phase of the Call to Code competition, students taking part will learn the basics of coding and develop their computer science skills.

This will work in tandem with support from their teacher during class time as well as outside of the classroom.

Then, students can elect themselves to take part in a competition that will include both logic puzzles and programming tasks designed for junior level and senior level cycles.

These students will then be ranked publicly on Google’s leaderboard by username and score in real time during the competition.

“Google Ireland created this competition to gain a better understanding of the knowledge of and interest in coding among students,” said Fionnuala Meehan, the head of Google’s Education Committee, about the event. “Coding is for everyone, male and female, and successful coding is about logic: if you can think logically, you can code.”

The 40 finalists chosen at the competition stage of Call to Code 2015 will progress to an event at Google’s EMEA headquarters in Dublin on 9 December to take part in the final round of the competition.

Google said that those hoping to take part must register before midday 23 November on its site for the event.

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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