Four secondary school students have been selected to represent Ireland at the 2014 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).
Richard Tynan (19) from Cistercian College, Roscrea; Aron Hoffman (17) from Luttrellstown Community College, Dublin; Conor Griffin (18) from Ardscoil Ris, Limerick; and Daniel Mulcahy (17) from Gonzaga College, Dublin will travel to Taipei in Taiwan on 11 July and compete against over 300 students from 86 other countries.
The students were selected at the Annual All-Ireland Olympiad (AIPO) at DCU co-sponsored by Fidelity investments.
AIPO co-ordinator Gary Conway from School of Computing, DCU, said: “These young students are self-educated in a variety of programming languages at a very high level. They are learning and using programming techniques which would normally be introduced to 3rd year computing students at the university level. The students have showed remarkable skills, not only in informatics and programming, but also in time management and stress control.”
Some of these students who participated in the programming bootcamp have already seen great success. Tynan and Mulcahy both won first prize in the technology category awards at this year’s BT Young Scientist Competition. Hoffman came first in the national All-Ireland Programming Olympiad (AIPO) final competition and Griffin has secured a place on the new portfolio entry advanced programming undergraduate degree, Computational Problem Solving and Software Development (CPSSD) in DCU.
Tynan said: “Competing in AIPO over the past few years has made me a faster, more accurate and more knowledgeable coder, teaching me about areas of computer science that I didn’t even know existed. I was fortunate to receive an offer to study computer science in Cambridge University in the United Kingdom next year, with one of the interviewers even saying my AIPO and IOI experience was “one the most impressive things” in my application.”
The team’s progress be followed on Facebook and Twitter @DCU_AIPO.
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